Brian Richardson - The Genealogies of Ulysses, The Invention of Postmodernism, and The Narratives of Literary History

The Genealogies of "Ulysses", the Invention of Postmodernism, and the Narratives of
Literary History
Author(s): Brian Richardson
Source: ELH, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1035-1054
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30031950
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THE GENEALOGIES OF ULYSSES, THE INVENTION OF
POSTMODERNISM, AND THE NARRATIVES OF
LITERARY HISTORY
BY BRIAN RICHARDSON
Joyce, perhaps wisely, never outlined a literary genealog

which his own works might be situated; as Clive Hart has ob
has always been far from easy to determine ... what his liter
and opinions were."1 Throughout his career he would denig
authors whose works were said to be similar to his own-one thinks of
his dismissive remarks about Lawrence and Stein, writers that from the
outset were considered part of the emerging canon of what would be
called modernism. More intriguingly, he also paid homage to a number
of predecessors that are otherwise quite difficult to be thought of as
participating in similar projects-Blake and Defoe, Flaubert and Tolstoy,
etc.-suggesting for himself the kind of unlikely precursors that Borges
would later discuss in connection with Kafka. Since his work first
became known, it has been placed within an increasing number of
different and even antithetical literary histories; as we all know, this
obsessive genealogical practice is currently growing more volatile and
contradictory.
In what follows, I will outline several of the main kinds of literary
histories Joyce's work has been placed within, discuss the appropriate-
ness, accuracy, and perceived advantages of each such placement, and
examine the case for a postmodern Ulysses. I will go on to speculate on
the larger reasons for these often strange and contradictory accounts,
and conclude with some observations on the narrative structure implicit
in many current versions of literary history. We may begin with what
was, until very recently, the most familiar story-that of Joyce as the
founder and guarantor of serious, quality, experimental literature. One
of the most sustained attempts to confer legitimacy on a new movement
by appealing to the precedent of Joycean (and Proustian) modernism
was set forth by the practitioners of the nouveau roman, almost all of
whom wrote on the nature of fiction in order to better situate their own
innovations. Robbe-Grillet, in his first major theoretical statement, "On
Several Obsolete Notions," constructs a series of lineal genealogies that
ELH 67 (2000) 1035-1054 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 1035
all stretch from Flaubert through Joyce and Proust, to Kafka and
Faulkner, and culminate in his own work, even using the image of the
branches of a tree to clarify respective positions and altitudes.2 Simi-
larly, Nathalie Sarraute in The Age of Suspicion claimed a fidelity to the
arduous tradition of the exploration of interiority as exemplified by
Joyce, Proust, and Woolf.3 Knowing a good strategy when they saw one,
the Tel Quel novelists-particularly Philippe Sollers-were quick to lay
claim to the avant garde mantle and Joycean lineage as they attempted
to move well beyond the parameters of the new novel.4 Even &criture
fiminine, another major experiment in prose of the period, was also
(perhaps somewhat surprisingly) granted a partial Joycean paternity.
...
The practice of calling o

aesthetic partially ended
ment that was supposed
the modernism it was
theoreticians of postmode
committed to a master na
going and rather ruthl
postmodernism necessari
modernism had to suppla
tends to falter precisely
theorist of postmodernism
to confront his insistent
Brian McHale's Postmoder
a discussion of the possible postmodernism of Joyce.6
McHale's conclusion in this, his first approach to the question, is that
Finnegans Wake (1939) is fully postmodern, while the earlier works are
not, a stance that complements Ihab Hassan's prior, persistent claiming
of the Wake for postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon, on the other hand,
refers to Joyce as one of "the great modernists, not postmodernists."7
Fredric Jameson insists on a historical rupture between a high modern-
ism that exhausted itself in a final flowering in the late 50s or early 60s
and the cultural practices of late capitalism, "a new social formation that
no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism"; he is uncomfortable
about conjoining Joyce with the postmodern.8 Others are more elusive:
Lyotard uses Joyce (in opposition to Proust) to locate the postmodern,
which "in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation
itself."9 Still others are playfully strident: Breon Mitchell states, "I deny
1036 The Genealogies of Ulysses
that Finnegans Wake is postmodern, [and] I view both Joyce and
Beckett as modernists."'0 And some change course: Brian McHale, in
his second discussion of this question, takes a position allied to that of
Lyotard in which he repeats and shifts his previous stance-now the
first half of Ulysses is a foundational text of modernism, while the
second half (excepting "Nausicaa" and "Penelope") is thoroughly
postmodern."
The stakes of this debate are very substantial. Either postmodernism
is a new form that, in responding to the new socio-historical conditions
that produced it, supersedes and supplants the older, dying, increasingly
irrelevant form of modernism; or, it was all invented a third of a
century-or indeed most of a century-before the pomo boom got
underway, and can be found in earlier works by other writers, such
Gertrude Stein, that stretch back to the origins of modernism itse
Postmodernism thus ceases to be particularly new, current, major,
even "post": it is possibly only the brief flourishing of a minor style that
has been around for some time-perhaps not unlike the recent revival
of the romance. Stated baldly, even cruelly, the fear is that if Joyce
already did it, it can't be very new; if he didn't, it may not be that
important. Thus Joyce's postmodernism, such as it is, must be denied,
repressed, mystified, or somehow made honorary rather than founda-
tional, a kind of impressive afterthought, as it were.
For an entirely different response, we may turn to what Joyce
scholars do with the concept of the postmodern (a topic, it might be
noted, on which there is relatively little critical material). Here the story
is completely inverted: according to critics like Margot Norris, "Finnegans
Wake is generally credited with the invention of postmodernism."12
Even before the "post" word was widely used, the linguistically daring
and structurally playful writing of authors who would later be called
postmodern was already being traced to an origin in the later Joyce. The
author of one such study, Christopher Butler, whose After the Wake: An
Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde appeared in 1980, has re-
cently cited with approval McHale's assertion of the Wake's
postmodernity, though without mentioning how it problematizes the
timeline McHale uses in Postmodernist Fiction." It is instructive to
reflect on the number and variety of fictional modes and schools
were once generally thought to have stemmed from Joyce even th
they did not always appear to have much else in common with ea
other: in addition to that designated in Butler's subtitle, we may r
the anti-novel, surfiction, the nouveau nouveau roman, the literatu
exhaustion, metafiction, the Tel Quel novel, fabulation, and others. All
Brian Richardson 1037
the disparate books which these nonsynonymous terms once denoted
are now seamlessly bound together under the name of postmodernism.
Other Joyceans are considerably more radical in their interrogations
of periodicity. Inverting temporal priority and reading Joyce after
Pynchon, Richard Pearce is moved to argue that "there is no difference
between modernism and postmodernism"; modernism simply desig-
nates a revolutionary text that has come to be interpreted conserva-
tively.14 Kevin Dettmar's work, which he himself describes as a "some-
what perverse examination" of Joyce's prose texts through postmodern
glosses, seriously questions the notion of a postmodern Wake, as it turns
up impressive evidence for a postmodern Ulysses.'5 (His attempt to find
postmodern elements in some of the stories in Dubliners [1914] is much
less compelling, I believe.) Dettmar's insights are many and substantial
and his work should be praised for pushing this important topic forward.
There are however a number of limitations to his approach that ensure
the necessity of additional debate. The primary problems include 1)
overly flexible definitions (postmodernism is often treated as if it were
the same as the carnivalesque: if this were true, Aristophanes would be
the first postmodernist); 2) limited aims: too often Dettmar is satisfied if
he shows that an early text has a few postmodern tendencies or passages;
and 3) incomplete coverage: just where does he situate the final four or
five chapters of Ulysses?16 Before moving on, let me reiterate that for all
the Joyceans doing postmodernism, there is no question of whether
Joyce wrote such texts, but only how far back his postmodernism
extends.'7
...
We may start with McH

centered on ontological issues (which I believe is an excellent point of
departure) and go on to give it a distinctive narratological corollary and
claim that the literature we call postmodern violates the boundaries
essential to nonfictional narrative or high modernism. (Works of high
modernism, that is, novels like To the Lighthouse [1927], typically do not
create impossible or logically contradictory situations-the same char-
acter doesn't die twice; rather, they use innovative forms to arrange
often ordinary material.) In the realm of the postmodern, the distinction
between the real and the unreal is problematized, as are the correlative
lines that attempt to separate fiction and nonfiction, history and
fabrication, homage and parody, subject and object, self and other, text
and world. This extends to the blurring or collapsing of another set of
differences in the narration itself between narrator and character,
dialogue and monologue, the "he" and the "I." Linear progression,
consistent meaning, and any pattern but the flagrantly random or starkly
parodic are resisted. All unity, essence, hierarchy, and order are chal-
lenged. (Modernism, by contrast, supplants existing orders with ones of
its own creation, and invents formal arrangements to replace the
inadequate ones found in the phenomenal world.)
Working with this concept of the postmodern-that of the violation
of foundational boundaries, both ontological and narratological-we
find that the Wake indeed incontrovertibly belongs to this grouping. So,
for that matter, do many of the later chapters of Ulysses, particularly
"Cyclops," "Eumaeus," and "Ithaca," as well as much of "Oxen of the
Sun" and "Circe" (insofar as the latter follows the logic of dreams,
expressionistic; where it conflates identities for its own sake,
postmodern). As has been observed in the past, Ulysses is governe
at least two antithetical aesthetics, one quintessentially modernist,
other defying modernist constraints. As Karen Lawrence states, "Uly
begins by deliberately establishing narrative rules that are bent a
finally broken later on."18 Or in the words of Daniel Schwarz, ther
at work in the novel "two major and contradictory formal principle
insistence on [organic, unified] integration and its refusal to allow e
word to signify in terms of coherent formal or structural patterns
Part of the material that violates the modernist aesthetic partakes of the
postmodern sensibility; indeed, it would be strange if it didn't.
It is time now to examine some specific passages. I offer that it is in
"Cyclops" that we first get sustained, thoroughgoing examples of the
unambiguously postmodern. Early in the chapter we find a curious use
of repetition in the lines "I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him.
Come on out here Geraghty, you notorious bloody hill and dale
robber!"20 The italicized portions constitute most of a sentence spoken
by Geraghty as reported earlier in the anonymous narrator's accoun

12.27); the rest is a slight variation of the phrase "that's the most
notorious bloody robber you'd meet in a day's walk" (U, 12.25-
which this narrator uses to characterize him. But the ontological status
of the second line I have quoted is highly ambiguous. It is entirely
unclear, and I suspect inherently unknowable, who is speaking, hearing,
or writing these lines. We cannot learn whether the words are spoken
once but transcribed twice, or spoken twice by our narrator, or repeated
once subvocally by the primary auditor, Joe. It might conceivably be
interjected by the "arranger" of the episode (the one who is responsible
for introducing the enormous lists, etc.).21 Conceivably, it could even be
the author mocking the character he has created. These are problems as
defined by (and unresolvable within) the modernist paradigm the
episode seems first to evoke by playing with narrators (McHale's
epistemological axis), and then to frustrate by refusing to provide the
explanatory parallax view that would resolve the ambiguity.
Karen Lawrence has identified a crucial feature of the curious
narration in this chapter that lies at the heart of Joyce's subversion of t
modernist poetics he has hitherto so perfectly embodied and extende
Lawrence argues against the position articulated by Marilyn French th
assigns the discourse to two narrators, one a character in the story a
another an off-scene narrator who supplies the exaggerated materi
Lawrence points out that this position "falsif[ies] our experience of t
heterogeneity of the parodies"; the series of very different styl
interpolations, and amplifications cannot be reduced to a single voice
perspective. In addition, she shows how even the chapter's two types
narrative stance "are not always separated from each other," and that
one form occasionally degenerates into the other.22 Again, this clearly
seems to be the kind of ontological conflation characteristic of
postmodernism.
Similar effects are produced elsewhere in the chapter. The extended
imitation of inflated prose styles goes beyond mere parody, or even a
narrative embodiment of a dominant theme, to a point that resists either
formal or carnivalesque recuperation. (It is here that we may make an
important differentiation between the carnivalesque and the
postmodern.) This is perhaps most evident if we compare two lis
individuals, one earlier and one later in the episode. The first
enumeration of Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, begins wi
"Cuchulin, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the ardri Ma
Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father John Murphy": that
perfectly plausible collection that errs on the side of inclusive
Somewhat later we get "the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonligh
Captain Boycott"-respectively, quasi-allegorical, pseudonymous, an
eponymous figures presented as typical-who are soon joined
"Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last of
Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for Galway, The Man that B
the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who
Didn't, Benjamin Franklin" (U, 12.176-87). A discernible logic is at
work here, as the figures grow increasingly implausible and the list
parodies ever more heartily the nationalists who, in their zeal to gain
recognition for neglected Irish figures or persons whose Irish origin had
been erased, defied historical accuracy while enlisting every imaginable
positive individual as a supporting member of the cause. Additionally,
certain of the figures in this group appear in various other guises
elsewhere in the work, as the modernist strategy of forming elaborate
patterns out of the most uncompromising material is upheld even within
the excesses of the ribald catalog. And this list grows more Rabelaisian
before it concludes, as Muhammad, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian
Confucius, and Adam and Eve are added, each of which (with the
possible exception of Brian Confucius) is part of an elaborate network of
symbols, motifs, and allusions running through the book.
Later in the chapter we are presented with a rather different list, one
delineating the clergy present at an exaggerated reconstruction of the
revival of traditional Irish sports:
William Delaney, S. J., L. L. D.; the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D. D.; the
rev. P. J. Kavanagh, C. S. Sp.; the rev. T. Waters, C. C.; the rev. John M.
Ivers, P. P.; the rev. P. J. Cleary, O. S. F.; the rev. L. J. Hickey, O. P.; the
very rev. Fr. Nicholas, O. S. F. C.; the very rev. B. Gorman, O. D. C.;
the rev. T. Maher, S. J.; the very rev. James Murphy, S. J.; the rev. John
Lavery, V. F.; the very rev. William Doherty, D. D.; the rev. Peter
Fagan, O. M.; the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A.; the rev. J. Flavin, C. C.; the
rev. M. A. Hackett, C. C.; the rev. W. Hurley, C. C.; the rt rev. Mgr
M'Manus, V. G.; the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. I.; the very rev. M. D.
Scally, P. P.; the very rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P.; the very rev. Timothy
canon Gorman, P. P.; the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C. (U, 12.927-38)
With the possible exception of Slattery, these are the names of actual
Catholic clergy of the day; nearly all are listed in the Irish Catholic
Directory for 1904.23 Though not completely devoid of potential humor
or structural links to the rest of the book (Hurley/hurling; the other
Murphy in "Eumaeus"), there is by Joycean standards relatively little of
either in this passage. It is rather a superfluous exercise in list making, a
tired exaggeration for its own sake, a redundant and repetitious sliver of
gigantism. It is in fact a sort of hollow version of the technique that
worked so effectively in the earlier pages of the episode, and it is this
willed failure, this decision to go through with avowedly empty narrative
gestures, that we correctly associate with the postmodern. Such de-
pleted forms of exaggeration, like the pro forma utilization of aban-
doned or rejected narrative techniques, recur elsewhere in this episode
and more insistently in most of the book's last chapters.24
The narrative of "Oxen of the Sun" is "enclosed between the
headpiece and tailpiece of opposite chaos," Joyce explained to Harri
Weaver.25 Elements of the arbitrary are present elsewhere in t
chapter, which contains a sedimented and deliberately obscured repr
sentation of events. The three opening words of the episode, coming
from three different languages, point toward the various conflations that
will follow; the unfertilized Latinate prose that ensues is another
rejection of the aesthetic ideal governing earlier pages. This chapter also
exhibits a different relation to literary antecedents than other parallels
that loom so largely earlier in the text. Unlike the shadows of Homer,
Shakespeare, and Dante that Joyce must lock horns with or elbow past,
the various authors and styles reworked here are not presented as rivals
or authorities worthy of Joyce's challenge. Instead, they jostle each other
indifferently as the pastiche-for Jameson, a key feature of the
postmodern-glides seamlessly from minor figure to major presence, as
Bunyan and Ruskin receive the same treatment.26 The partially indis-
cernible identities of the authors Joyce rewrites reveal the text's growing
indifference to classical literary agons. Neither do the passages form
self-consistent units; other, extrinsic voices often intrude and contami-
nate the foregrounded style. There are of course basic formal principles,
such as gestation, governing the material as a whole, but the individual
passages show a marked tendency to elude the control that operates
most effectively at a macrocosmic level. Throughout this chapter we also
find numerous occasions of a seemingly calculated emptying of earlier
styles, as prior forms are presented in order to be (or to be shown to be)
depleted and exhausted.27
Many of the transformations and other antirealist features of "Circe"
can be explained by reference to psychological processes, thematic
manipulation, and expressionist technique. But these interpretive strat-
egies, though essential, are not complete and cannot contain all the
figures and events of this chapter. Sherrill Grace suggests that "[s]everal
features of 'Circe' indicate that here Joyce aims at a parody that repeats
with difference the familiar features of expressionist drama while
moving toward a mockery of expressionism and the expressionist
protagonist."28 Much the same might be said of familiar psychoanalytic
notions such as displacement and projection: the operatic avatars of
Stephen's ashplant might well give nightmares to an orthodox Freudian.
It could be added that the distinctive types of rhetorical transformation
in this chapter, which Lawrence identifies as dramatized conceits and
metaphors made literal, are particularly conducive to ontological slip-
page, both from event to its perception and from mind to mind.29
Finally, there are also some strikingly postmodern figures, whose
primary function seems to be to destabilize the admittedly highly
flexible ontological frames that attempt to circumscribe the episode. I
am thinking in particular here of the cartoonish figure of the Siamese
twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober (U, 15.2512-89), the semi-
articulate Shakespeare (U, 15.3828-29), Old Sleepy Hollow (U, 15.3158),
and the waterfall (15.3429-30), all of which strike me as clearly bearing
the playful decenteredness of the postmodern.30
Not unexpectedly, the cases for a postmodern "Eumaeus" and
"Ithaca" are easiest to make: they are after all the chapters that the more
resolutely modernist readers enjoy the least. Derek Attridge suggests
that there is no inherent reason to insist on the linkage between the
pompous, bloated style of "Eumaeus" and any single figure, whether
character or narrator, that might be thought to be responsible for it.
Building on observations made by Fritz Senn, he points out that "the
ways in which the language of this episode permits slippage and
uncertainty, deception and detour ... go beyond a particular character'
mental condition and spring from the propensities and liabilities of
language itself."31 This language exceeds any naturalizing principle, as
moves beyond the epistemological issues of individual voice and narra-
tive perspective to unknowable events and a style that eludes identifica-
tion with any one self-consistent point of origin. In the words of Andrew
Gibson, its "exhilarating abandonment to artful blunder [and] gleef
revelling in the possibilities of the fatuous" look forward to and prep
the ground for the anti-style of Sorrentino, B. S. Johnson, and Kath
Acker."2
In "Ithaca," as Zack Bowen explains, there is a "purposeful confusion
of relevancy and irrelevancy: of human nature and the empirical world
we live in ratified by the recital of facts that seem randomly relevant and
irrelevant, and the whole framed in a catechetical system of questions
and answers originally designed to prove with rhetorical certainty the
existence of the unknowable."33 Here the very conventions of communi-
cation-whether functional or literary-are violated as redundancy,
randomness, and uselessness help to generate the text (for example,
"the initial rate of 1/4d to be increased constantly in the geometrical
progression of 2 (1/4d, 1/2d, Id, 2d, 4d, 8d, is 4d, 2s 8d, to 32 terms)"
[U, 17.1694]; this is by no means an extreme specimen). Subsequently,
the catechistic form would be given a more menacing tone and would be
deployed throughout postmodern fictions like Pinget's The Inquisitory
(1963) and Jeanette Winterson's "The Poetics of Sex" (1993), and its
gratuitous objectivity would inspire Beckett and Robbe-Grillet.
These chapters then are, I believe, the strongest candidates in a case
to be made for a substantially postmodern Ulysses. Finally, the issue is
not whether or not there are any postmodern moments secreted within
the text: most every sustained, complex, playful work can normally be
expected to contain at least a few. The question is rather whether the
violation of primal boundaries is sufficiently insistent to preclude the
text's recuperation by the poetics of high modernism-and this, I argue,
is precisely the case in "Cyclops," "Oxen," "Circe," "Eumaeus," and
"Ithaca."
"Sirens," by contrast (and contra both Dettmar and the later Mc

I view as a quintessential, if extreme, example of high or ultra mo
ism, since all the elements of the chapter are fully recuperab
nearly always know who is doing what, and which sequences are re
which are imagined-and they are fairly thoroughly ordered
consistent formal principle (a version of the form of the fuga per
canonem). This is equally true of those sentences apparently filled with
syntactic conflations superficially similar to the kind of sentence one
associates with the postmodern: "One rapped on a door, one tapped
with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock with a loud proud knocker with
a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock" (U, 11.986-88). Each element is
part of the pattern announced by the chapter's opening chords, and
most every divergence from standard usage can be fully explained
phenomenologically, musically, thematically, or stylistically.34 That is,
these conflations turn out to be elisions that constitute part of a newly
created and carefully maintained formal pattern.
Similarly, I believe that the epistemological aesthetic of high modern-
ism is clearly the dominant organizing principle behind the rest of the
chapters, including "Aeolus" (despite its occasionally parodic captions)
and the relatively decentered "Wandering Rocks.""" Perhaps somewhat
counter-intuitively, we should probably judge the first half of "Nausicaa"
as modernist: though it looks forward to the parodic free play within
abandoned or rejected genres present in a number of postmodern
pieces, it is still contained within a single, albeit highly

consciousness; the actual and the imagined are readily distin
and the events it narrates are entirely recuperable. It is more
pastiche, and modernist rather than postmodern. This leaves u
fluid, only apparently random prose of "Penelope"-a narr
mously contained within a single consciousness, and one whi
speculation on the ways that considerably more fragmented
&criturefrminine fail to fit easily within either modernist or pos
paradigms, but rather exist beside them, as it were. In any event
a turning back from the early postmodernism of the chapter
ately preceding it, thereby problematizing attempts to simply
at the level of the book the more general narrative of "first mod
then postmoderism.""36
...
If the concept of postmodernism as a distinctive cultural practice has

any meaning, then it will have characteristic and even unique features
and practices. However, using this or any account that describes specific
narrative practices, we find that the elements said to be characteristic of
postmodernism cannot be limited to the last half of the century, but
clearly reach back-through the works of Joyce-for about a hundred
years. I suggest that it is misleading and historically evasive to view
postmodernism as a movement that was born in the late fifties,
flourishes today, and happens to have an embarrassingly lengthy history
of significant antecedents that stretch back through Beckett and Blanchot,
Queneau and Djuna Barnes, Flann O'Brien and Mikhail Bulgakov,
Borges and Roussel, Luigi Pirandello and Ronald Firbank, Woolf's
Orlando (1928) and Joyce's Wake, Gide's Counterfeiters (1925) and the
final chapters of Ulysses, early Unamuno and Gertrude Stein, all the
way back to Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896).37 Let us instead be historically
accurate and rather view both movements, high modernism and
postmodernism, as competing strategies that, instead of existing sequen-
tially, extend throughout the duration of the twentieth century. One
tradition, stemming from early turn-of-the-century work by Stein and
others, might-with a playfully oxymoronic prefix that cancels out a
misleading temporal marker-usefully be termed "the avant-
postmodern," as it points to a continuity between contemporary
postmodernism and its antecedents in earlier avant-garde movements.
The other poetics, that of high modernism, stretches from the
Henry James forward to include the latest neomodernist work of figu
like Graham Swift, Nadine Gordimer, Anita Brookner, Edna O'Br
Anita Desai, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Eva Figes. (There is in fact a
neomodernist renaissance currently taking place that the standard view
of modern literary history does not allow us to adequately recognize.)
Once we read postmodernism as a style or method of making cultural
artifacts rather than the inescapable epiphenomenon of cultural prac-
tices of the post-industrial period, then the history of literature be

both extremely unruly and potentially very exciting. Specifically, w
be tempted to see whether any other distinct poetics hav
carelessly thrown together under the loose, baggy rubric of mod
and whether still other practices deserve to be represented
thorough and accurate history of modern fiction. Elsewher
argued for the existence of four major, continuous types of m
fiction, each of which can be found in every decade: high mod
avant-postmodern, expressionist, and realist (which, after all, is the
governing aesthetic of most fiction published during any segment of this
century.)38 In addition, I have suggested that a fifth type, ironic versions
of the romance, recurs irregularly through the century, from Conrad to
Powys to Murdoch to Lodge to Byatt. Five such categories are probably
the minimum necessary to begin to map the profusion of styles
throughout the twentieth century and, for that matter, throughout the
text of Ulysses.39
Nor can we comfortably say the story is corrected and completed
with these five. Still more detailed and refined analysis of particularly
rich periods can be expected to turn up still more unruly profusions, and
this is true of the years just before and immediately following the turn of
the century: think of the more "typologically resistant" pieces of
MacDonald, Stevenson, Beardsley, Chesterton, Kipling, Beerbohm,
James Stephens, Wyndham Lewis, W. H. Hudson, Dorothy Richardson,
Vita Sackville-West, Ronald Firbank, H. P. Lovecraft, and Jean Rhys.
The writers of this roughly thirty-year span hardly have any features in
common at all. This is not to argue against the construction of histories
of literature, but rather to stress just what the narrative economy of the
historical form necessarily leaves out. The more streamlined the histori-
cal narrative, the more inaccurate it should be assumed to be.
...
And in fact all of this discu

strange to the original read
what modernism was, let a
Ulysses was a strange beast,
discernable genre. Reviewe
expressed their consternation over what kind of book it could be. As
indicated in the standard collection of contemporary reviews, notices,
and comments, the only names that were regularly evoked were Sterne
(repeatedly), Rabelais (frequently), and Cervantes (occasionally); other
analogues suggested by Joyce's contemporaries that literary historians
no longer bother to record include Carlyle, Smollett, Duchamp, Balzac,
Zola, Anatole France, and "a demented George Meredith."40
It was Pound who, while observing that "[n]either Gargantua, nor
Don Quixote, nor Sterne's Tristram Shandy had furnished the arche-
type" for this text, stated instead that it is "the first work that,
descending from Flaubert, continues the development of the Flaubertian
art from where he left it off in his last, unfinished book."41 In another
short article written about the same time, Pound includes Henry James
and Marcel Proust as appropriate coevals and members of the Flaubertian
lineage; thus what would become the modernm-or rather, modernist-
genealogy begins to take root (once the references to the Goncourts are
removed, of course), a lineage that would be partially codified by
Edmund Wilson's study, Axel's Castle (1931), and largely fixed for
students of Joyce by early academic critics like Harry Levin.42 Though
the name of this movement would shift from symbolism to modernism,
its basic family structure would remain relatively unchanged.
If we were to try to avoid the pitfalls of overly narrow periodization
and the assigning of arbitrary origins, and instead speculate on possible
connection stretching over different eras, just how far back can we go in
establishing Joyce's own writerly lineage? We could in fact look first at
two ancient prose narratives, Petronius's first century Satyricon and
Lucian's second century tale with the postmodern title A True Story
(Verae Historiae). In an article rarely mentioned in subsequent criti-
cism, J. F. Killeen states that "Ulysses approximates the Satyricon not
only in being a travestied Odyssey but in the variety of styles in which it
is written and in a spirit of parody and burlesque so comprehensive as
not to spare from mockery even the most traditionally sacred senti-
ments."43 Much the same can be said of A True Story, which recounts a
grotesquely exaggerated series of epic-style events, often presented
through a kind of exaggeration reminiscent of that in the "Cyclops"
episode. At the very origin of the extended fictional narrative in prose,
we find two works constructed very much like Ulysses.44
This in turn may make us want to look once more at T. S. Eliot's
"Ulysses, Order, and Myth," to which Dettmar refers as "not only one of
the most familiar pieces of early Ulysses criticism, but one of the best-
known pieces in modernist literary criticism."45 In particular, we will
want to reconsider Eliot's famous pronouncement, that Joyce's "parallel
use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a
scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a founda-
tion before."46 This statement, I suggest, is entirely false; the practice it
describes has an origin that lies in the earliest prehistory of the novel.
And Eliot should have known this.
Joyce, for that matter, didn't even rediscover the practice, if the
practice referred to is the realistic presentation of more ordinary
individuals and scenes that correspond to classic literary texts from a
remote period written in a heightened style. Prominent examples of this
type include Gottfried Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet (1856) and
Turgenev's A King Lear of the Steppe (1870), while the general
trajectories of King Lear, Agamemnon, and Hamlet in quite different
ways inform the plots of Balzac's PNre Goriot (1834), Strindberg's The
Father (1887), and Chekhov's The Seagull (1896). Furthermore, as R. B.
Kershner has shown, popular novels of the period, such as Tom Greer's
A Modern Daedalus (1885), frequently contained similar such "discover-
ies."47 One wonders how Eliot's abrupt erasure of the history of
literature was taken so seriously for so long.48
...
Looking back over the adm

we may nevertheless iden
one that obfuscates the g
cuts off the modern nove
attempts to enforce an a
earlier texts and that prac
and plays of the later nine
overly reductive literary hi
literature by the historic
Joyce himself generally r
essay on Mangan he affirme
"at war with its age, so it m
the essay in 1907, he adds t
market place unimportant-the succession of the ages, the spirit of the
age, the mission of the race."49
Writers like Joyce regularly dismiss an insistently historical approach
to type, mode, and genre because it frequently (or perhaps typically)
streamlines, oversimplifies, and arbitrarily valorizes one facet of an
author's production or one aspect of the period s/he works within,
necessarily undervaluing other directions and constructions. That is, the
stories it is obligated to tell are always too good to be true. Often, it
cannot explain something as basic as an author's decision to move back
and forth between different poetics, a problem that itself poses signifi-
cant problems for theorists of the postmodern.50 Thus Beckett's The
Unnamable (1953) is utterly postmodern, while his Company (1980) is
modernist, and Worstward Ho (1983) is postmodern again. This should
not be perceived as anomalous. Major writers typically like major
challenges, and none may be greater than succeeding in a new or
different form. Think of the range of Flaubert, embracing the realist/
modernist Madame Bovary (1857), the expressionist Temptation of St.
Anthony (1874), the historical Salammbo (1862), and the encyclopedic
anatomy Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881). Or think of the more recent
scope of an Angela Carter. The other feature that literary history cannot
explain is literary influence, an issue that must always be central for
those who work with Joyce. As Richard Brown has recently observed: "It
would be hard to find a post-Joycean writer in the language who,
whether by imitation or reaction, has escaped his influence."5' This is
one strand of Joyce's genealogies that can never be accounted for by
purely historical explanation, and shows no particular signs of diminish-
ment as historical distance increases and socio-economic arrangements
continue to alter.
The antidote to the limitations caused by excessive or uncritical
reliance on historically derived periodizing is to exercise a more
meticulous and less fettered search for more accurate positionings in
earlier literature, regardless of how unlikely or untimely these may at
first appear. Indeed, part of the fascination of literature is its uncanny
ability to rehabilitate lost forms that had been thought to have been
definitively superseded. It may well be that the works that remain most
challenging and provocative are those that most effectively resist a facile
historicization. Literary history proper should not of course be ignored,
but it should be complemented by study of the history of literature
itself, however wayward, disconnected, and devious such a history might
be.52 Indeed, one suspects that an accurate account of the literature of
any interesting period should resemble less the regular branches of a
family tree than unruly rhizomatic shapes that never repeat them-
selves-if not in fact the disorderly series of irregular wiggles that
Tristram Shandy uses to map out his own wayward plotline.
It is especially important that the inherent limitations of literary
history be kept in mind now that new and old historicisms are firmly in
the ascendent among the sexier academics. I do not mean to advocate
that we ignore the methods and insights of cultural or historical
materialism (though there is no longer any place for determinedly
vulgar Marxism); but we should no longer insist categorically that
postmodernism first appeared in the late fifties in advanced industrial-
ized countries, and we may well want to ask why it grew to such
prominence among Anglo-American academics following the collapse of
the New Left. There is probably an important socio-economic compo-
nent to the answer to this question.
Narratives of literary history always need to be complemented and
mediated by the untidy chronicle of literary forms.53 We should never
merely historicize. Or, to approach this issue from a different vantage
point, it can be urged that the relentlessly linear trajectory, simple causal
progression, and implicitly teleological structure that are assumed by
most practioners of modern literary history be subjected to the same
critical scrutiny that we give other narratives. As Jerome McGann points
out, history itself "is a field of indetermininacies, with movements to be
seen running along lateral and recursive lines as well as linearly, and by
strange diagonals and various curves, tangents, and even within random
patterns."54 We need to historicize much more dialectically than we
have in the past.
Other consequences can be derived from this analysis. We will want
to make room in our conceptual schemes for poetics that go beyond
modernism but are not reducible to postmodernism, such as magic
realism, theater of the absurd, and the more radical kinds of Jcriture
fdminine. These modes can help remind us of the unruliness of the past
and the fragility of all genealogical narrative structures. When it
concerns literature, most paternities may be critical fictions. The
postmodern needs to be sought and recognized in decades that had
previously been placed out of bounds, particularly concerning Joyce and
his contemporaries. It is time to acknowledge the continuum between
postmodernism and the avant-garde, as well as to explore more fully
Joyce's alliances with the avant-garde.66 By contrast, we must reject
David Hayman's assertion that, while "[w]e can spot its sources all over
the literary map, [Ulysses] belongs properly to the Flaubertian tradition
of literary craftsmanship which was created out of what Joyce called the
'classic temper."'"56 After the assaults on this construction by post-
structuralist, Bakhtinian, and now postcolonial and postmodernist critics
and scholars, we are unlikely to see many more lines of affiliation drawn
back to Flaubert-unless it is to the other Flaubert, the author of The
Temptation of St. Anthony, of Salammbo, of Bouvard and Pecuchet.
In this essay I have tried to show how the various genealogical
narratives surrounding Ulysses, though plausible enough in isolation,
produce a rather preposterous totality when placed side by side. I have
tried to show that the arbitrary or artificial imposition of rigid temporal
boundaries results in a skewed and ironically unhistorical depiction of
postmodernism, and that any viable concept of postmodern literature
must come to terms with earlier works in that mode, including the later
chapters of Ulysses and the work of Gertrude Stein and others. I have
also tried to identify more general errors of an overly zealous periodization
that artificially delimits actual lineages, sources, and influences. A
keener alertness to the range and possibilities of the history of literature
can give us a richer and more accurate picture of postmodernism, of
Joyce's immediate and ancient models, and perhaps even of the origins
of the novel itself. Paradoxically but not surprisingly, one can find both
an utterly classic Ulysses that recovers and recasts partially lost narrative
traditions and a thoroughly postmodern Joyce who pioneered a new
poetics decades before it was discovered and named by literary scholars.
University of Maryland
NOTES
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the North American James Joyce
Symposium in Toronto, June 1997. I wish to thank R. B. Kershner and Nels Pears
their generous comments on earlier versions.
1 Clive Clive Hart, "Foreword" to Arthur Power, Conversations with James J

(New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 5.
2 Robbe-Grillet, "On Several Obsolete Notions" (1957), in For a New
on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1965), 27.
3 See Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion, trans. Maria Jolas (195
Brazilier, 1963), esp. 77-117.
4 As Jennifer Levine observes, the Tel Quel Joyce was primarily the Joyce
("Rejoycings in Tel Quel," James Joyce Quarterly 16 [1978]: 17-26).
account of the relation of Joyce's work to that of the Tel Quel group, see G
The French Joyce (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1990), 122-33.
5 For a particularly candid attempt to come to grips with this situation
chapter of Brian McHale's Constructing Postmodernism (London: Rout
6 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), 233-35.
7 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fictio
Routledge, 1988), 88.
8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Lat
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 1-3. In the conclusion to this work,
acknowledge that some modernist authors lend themselves to postmodern
grudgingly admits that Colin MacCabe has constructed a feminist and
Joyce that "we might be willing to celebrate as postmodern" (303). If
Joyce away from modernism, however, Jameson prefers "a Third Wo
imperialist Joyce more consistent with a contemporary than a moder
(303).
6 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postnmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984),
81.
10 Breon Mitchell, "Samuel Beckett and the Postmodernism Controversy," in Explor-
ing Postmodernism, ed. Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 1987), 118.
11 McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, 42-58. The problems with this formulation,
as the analysis that follows should clarify, are twofold: two categories, the modern and
the (proto)postmodern, are insufficient to encompass the full range of Joyce's text, and
the ultimately implicit sequence of first modern then (mostly) postmodern does not do
justice to the more serpentine progression (and retrogression) of styles and aesthetics
within the book-as well as throughout the century.
12 Margot Norris, "The Postmodernism of Finnegans Wake Reconsidered," in
Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism, ed. Kevin J. Dettmar (Ann
Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992), 343. In this essay Norris goes on to historicize
the Wake's postmodernization.
13 Christopher Butler, "Joyce, Modernism, and Post-modernism," in The Cambridge
Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1990), 259-82.
14 Richard Pearce, "What Joyce after Pynchon?" in James Joyce: The Centennial
Symposium, ed. Morris Beja, Philip Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), 43.
15 Kevin Dettmar, The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain (Ann
Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), 15.
16 For a judicious analysis of Dettmar's achievements and limitations, see R. B.
Kershner's review of The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism in the James Joyce Literary
Supplement 2.2 (1997): 20.
17 Charles Caramello, one of the first framers of postmodernism, has a compelling
article that remains both fresh and pertinent to this debate. See his "Performing Self a
Performance: James Joyce, and the Postmodern Turn," in Southern Humanities Review
15 (1981): 301-5.
18 Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1981), 54.
19 Daniel R. Schwarz, Reading Joyce's Ulysses (London: Macmillan, 1987), 3.
20 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus
Melchior (1922; New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 12.100-1, emphasis in the original.
Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by episode and line numbers and abbreviated
U.
21 On the role and functions of the arranger, see David Hayman, Ulysses: The
Mechanics of Meaning, rev. ed. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 84, 88-104.
For recent discussions of this figure (or function), see John Somer, "The Self-Reflexive
Arranger in the Initial Style of Joyce's Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly 31 (1994): 65-79;
and Hazard Adams, "Critical Constitution of the Literary Text: The Example of
Ulysses," in his Antithetical Essays in Literary Criticism and Liberal Education
(Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1990), 90-110.
22 Lawrence, 102 ("falsif[ies]"), 105 ("are not").
23 See Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James
Joyce's Ulysses, 2d ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 343-44.
24 In addition, as Lawrence observes, "Cyclops" provides "a kind of slapstick craziness
in the writing ... [it] is meant to seem improvisational, as if the lid keeping down excess
and craziness in the preceding chapters had been lifted. There is a deliberate
arbitrariness to the writing" (109). It hardly needs to be added that these features,
particularly their rejection of formal conventions, are virtual hallmarks of postmodern
style.
25 Joyce to Harriet Weaver, 16 August 1920, in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart
Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 3:16.
26 In describing both Ulysses's and modern writing's general move toward "a literature
of the intertextual," Andre Topia employs language that is particularly apt when applied
to the postmodern aspect of "Oxen of the Sun": "The element of parody is injected into
the texture of the writing in such a manner that the reader is confronted with variations
which he is tempted to take for the norm, which in its turn is inevitably subverted by
that hesitation between origins. The text-which one then hesitates to call original,
parody or quotation-becomes a place where the author pits discourses against one
another, always distorting them slightly" ("The Matrix and the Echo: Intertextuality in
Ulysses," in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Attridge and Daniel
Ferrer [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984], 104).
37 It is not surprising that the postmodern Cuban writer Severo Sarduy-himself
affiliated with the Tel Quel group-employs a comparable historical progression of
styles in the third chapter of his novel, From Cuba with a Song (1966).
28 Sherrill Grace, "Midsummer Madness and the Day of the Dead: Joyce, Lowry, and
Expressionism," in Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy and
Paul Tiessen (Lexington: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1997), 15.
'" Lawrence, 146-47.
:30 See also McHale's account of the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the
hallucinatory in the episode (Constructing Postmodernism, 49-51).
31 Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to
James Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 183.
32 Andrew Gibson, Reading Narrative Discourse (New York: St. Martin's, 1990), 79.
33 Zack Bowen, Ulysses as a Comic Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1989), 68.
34 For a fascinating recent attempt to utilize the principles of twelve tone composition
to read this episode, see David Herman, "'Sirens' after Schoenberg," James Joyce
Quarterly 31 (1994): 473-94.
35 Dettmar, largely on the basis of the free play of the headlines, finds "Aeolus"
postmodern (151-56, 182-87); his analysis, however, is not compelling unless one grants
a signal importance to the headlines.
36 It is this sequence that I believe is ultimately re-inscribed by McHale in his second
approach to Ulysses's postmodernity, despite the numerous cautionary caveats he
expresses (Constructing Postmodernism, 42-58).
36 Here too the theorists of postmodernism do not seem to be reading enough of the
critical studies of relevant authors (though to be fair, the time lag occasioned by print
publication may account for some of the absences). In addition to the essay by Margot
Norris already cited, see Pamela L. Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism:
Literature in Quest and Question of Itself (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991); Bonnie
Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism. Volume Two: Postmodernist Readings of Woolf,
West, and Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995); Ellen Berry, Curved
Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism (Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press, 1992); Joshua D. Esty, "Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and the
Post-Post Debate," Ariel 26 (1995): 23-46; and, for more general accounts, the material
cited in my article, "Re-Mapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary
History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction," Twentieth Century Litera-
ture 43 (1997): 291-309.
38 See Richardson, "Re-Mapping the Present."

39 On the expressionist aspects of Ulysses see Richard K. Cross, Flaubert and Joy
The Rite of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), 125-49; and Gr
"Midsummer Madness." The ironic version of romance would occur in the first pa
"Nausicaa." And, with Joyce there is always something more: the "Wandering Roc
episode nods in the direction of the kind of loosely connected, "stream-of-life"
narratives one finds in the work of Dorothy Richardson, Henry Miller, and others
40 James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming, 2 vols. (Lon
Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970), 1:192; also see 1:192-239.
41 Ezra Pound, "Pound on Ulysses and Flaubert," Mercure de France 156 (June 19
rpt. in The Critical Heritage, 1:263.
42 See Pound, "Ulysses," The Dial 72 (June 1922); rpt. in Literary Essays of Ezra
Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1960), 403-9, esp. 405.
43 J. F. Killeen, "James Joyce's Roman Prototype," Comparative Literature 9 (1957):
193.
44 I explore these parallels in my article, "Make It Old: Lucian's A True Story, Joyce's
Ulysses, and Homeric Patterns in Ancient Fiction," Comparative Literature Studies 37
(2000): 371-84.
45 Dettmar, 163.
46 Eliot, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," The Dial 72 (November 1923); rpt. in The
Critical Heritage, 1:270.
47 See Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 190-95.
48 See M. Keith Booker on "the myth of the mythic method" for an additional critique
of the implications and effects of Eliot's text, both for subsequent readings of
modernism and for Eliot's attempts to shape such readings (Joyce, Bakhtin, and the
Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics [Ann Arbor: Univ. Of
Michigan Press, 1995], 17, also see 17-44). As Booker observes, "Eliot's delineation of
the mythic method serves not only as a [rather conservative] description of Ulysses but
also as a promotion of his own project in The Waste Land and as an anticipation of his
use of mythic prototypes in later plays like The Family Reunion" (19).
49 Joyce, "James Clarence Mangan" (1902) and "James Clarence Mangan [2]" (1907),
in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Ellmann (New York:
Viking, 1964), 81 ("at war"), 185 ("Poetry considers"). These passages are discussed by
Robert Spoo as part of his impressive account of the concepts of history and teleology in
Ulysses in his study James Joyce and the Language of History (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1994), 66-88. Spoo also provides a stimulating account of Joyce's critique of
standard Victorian teleological constructs of literary history within "Oxen of the Sun"
(136-45).
50 I discuss this issue in greater length in my article, "Re-Mapping the Present."
51 Richard Brown, James Joyce: A Post-Culturalist Perspective (London: Macmillan,
1992), 68. This situation is perhaps even more pronounced in Irish letters; Denis
Donoghue has stated that "no writer in Ireland has been strong enough to modify
Joyce's sense of Irish experience in fiction" ("Being Irish Together," The Sewanee
Review 84 [1976]: 131).
52 For an excellent discussion of this antinomy, see Alastair Fowler, "The Tw

Histories," in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins (Cambridg
Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 114-31.
53 For a brief account of the features and functions of the chronicle, narrative history
and the annals, see Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of
Reality," in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981
1-23.
54 Jerome T. McGann, "History, Herstory, Theirstory, Ourstory," in Theoretical Issues

in Literary History, ed. David Perkins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 197.
55 On the affiliation between the avant-garde and postmodernism, see Calinescu, Fiv
Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1987), 132-44, and Mihaly Szegedy
Maszak, "Teleology in Postmodern Fiction," in Exploring Postmodernism, 41-57.
56 Hayman, 11.

Brian Richardson - The Genealogies of Ulysses, The Invention of Postmodernism, and The Narratives of Literary History

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The Genealogies of "Ulysses", the Invention of Postmodernism, and the Narratives of

Joyce, perhaps wisely, never outlined a literary genealog

The practice of calling o

1036 The Genealogies of Ulysses

Brian Richardson 1037

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by Geraghty as reported earlier in the anonymous narrator's accoun

Brian Richardson 1039

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"Sirens," by contrast (and contra both Dettmar and the later Mc

pieces, it is still contained within a single, albeit highly

1044 The Genealogies of Ulysses

If the concept of postmodernism as a distinctive cultural practice has

tices of the post-industrial period, then the history of literature be

Brian Richardson 1045

And in fact all of this discu

1046 The Genealogies of Ulysses

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Looking back over the adm

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1 Clive Clive Hart, "Foreword" to Arthur Power, Conversations with James J

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38 See Richardson, "Re-Mapping the Present."

Brian Richardson 1053

52 For an excellent discussion of this antinomy, see Alastair Fowler, "The Tw

54 Jerome T. McGann, "History, Herstory, Theirstory, Ourstory," in Theoretical Issues

1054 The Genealogies of Ulysses

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