HYSTERICISING MODERNISM:

MODERNITY IN JOYCE

GARRY LEONARD

Abstract: In the twentieth century commodified objects begin to replace the

subject as a guarantor of “inner” being. This phenomenon is complicated for the
Irish “semicolonial” subject,1 as in Joyce’s work, who anticipates the situation of
the post-Imperial subject following World War I. Both subjects must turn to the
magic of commodities to shore up the eroded image of the self. The role of soap
in Ulysses is an excellent illustration, and a review of soap advertisements in
Victorian and Edwardian England shows how soap’s commodification is deeply
involved with British hegemony and with subject construction.

Twentieth century western culture has been called “the age of anxiety,” and
this is usually accounted for by noting the dwindling belief in God, the
breaking up of the great chain of being, and the accompanying loss of a
sense that everything happens for a purpose—however inscrutable that
purpose might appear to us. Alexander Pope’s famous and succinct pro-
nouncement “whatever is, is right,” sidesteps questions of good and evil
and encourages faith in a plan deeper, broader, and more complex than we
are able to fathom. One standard reference for illustrating the catastrophic
loss of Pope’s belief in a higher organizing power is Arnold’s “Dover
Beach” with its lamentation about the once full sea of faith. Once this sea
retreats, it leaves anxiety and uncertainty in its place.
I’m not disputing the validity of this line of intellectual history,
which seems reasonable to me, but I am suggesting that the corollary of “the

1
See Derek Atdridge and Marjorie Howes, eds. Semicolonial Joyce
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000).
168 Leonard

age of anxiety” can be seen when we think of modernity as “the age

of the object.” Scientific advances in printing, lithography and machine pro-
duction permitted a world where an enormous amount of “things” could be
first produced, and then advertised, as necessary, even “magical.” Indeed,
with supply so outrunning demand, the need to make the surplus seem essen-
tial became the engine of twentieth-century capitalism (a dynamic still very
much with us today in the curious phrase “consumer confidence index”). Put
most simply, the lack of assumed faith in transcendental certitude put much
more pressure on secular objects to serve as confirmation of identity and
self-worth. If these objects could not be blessed, they could be advertised.
Even objects long sacred, such as the communion wafer, can now
be seen as successfully marketed commodities, as when Bloom looks in on
a Catholic mass and sees the parishioners lining up for the wafer. “Good
idea the Latin,” he muses, “stupefies them first” (U 5.350–51). For
“Latin,” read “advertising jingle.” Potted meat is nothing special, but,
before it’s consumed, Plumtree’s stupefies with its sing-songy promise of
an “abode of bliss.” Most importantly, the rise of the object accompanies
the diminishment of the subject. The more diminished the subject, the
more oracular the object, right up to our own time where even a deodorant
is called “Sure”—because we are not. Objects become more and more ani-
mated as subjects feel less and less the center of cognition and the origin of
meaning. Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” becomes, according to the
artist Barbara Kruger, “I shop, therefore I am.”2 Whereas Descartes imagined
an internal process of rearrangement leading to a self-affirming knowledge
of the world (i.e. the eventual discovery of the intrinsic and relative worth of
objects and the laws governing them), in the experience of modernity we
find ourselves at the center of a cluster of objects, and nominate the effect
of this constellation on our state of being as “subjectivity.”
Twentieth century terminology vis-à-vis the object has also frac-
tured into different forms: the object relations theory of Melanie Klein,
the objet a of Lacan, the commodity of Marx and Benjamin, the “thing” of
Heidegger. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss and delineate
these various forms; I am more interested in the relationship between sub-
jectivity and the object world in modernity, and the way this is aestheti-
cized in modernism. Rather than discuss the relative merit of the various
categories, I want to historicize, as a by-product of modernity, the need to

2
Barbara Kruger, Love For Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara
Kruger (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1990).
 Hystericising Modernism 169

catalogue different sorts of objects, and object relations, from surrealism

through Kleinian and Lacanian theory into the virtual universe of
Baudrillard. For example, I would argue that the concept of Lacan’s objet a,
which permits him to argue that the object of desire is not what you desire,
but what causes you to desire, says more about the rise of commodities and
the corresponding experience of the “self ” as a pastiche of “selves,” than
anything “universal” about the human psyche. Joyce studies is and will be
at the forefront of cultural studies because Joyce had a ferocious tendency,
arguably more than any other modernist, to show the secret connectedness
of apparently disparate phenomena.
Gianni Vattimo discusses how “modernity is in fact dominated by
the idea that the history of thought is a progressive “enlightenment” which
develops through an ever more complete appropriation and reappropriation
of its own ‘foundations’. … ”3 What interests me here is how “ideas” are
also treated as “things” in Vattimo’s equation: they accumulate; they can be
appropriated and reappropriated. Ideas in a philosophy behave like things
in a “lifestyle,” announcing, by their very existence and the way they
are arranged, a presumably “foundational” way of being. Vattimo goes on
to outline how “the idea of “overcoming,” which is so important in all
modern philosophy, understands the course of thought as being a progres-
sive development in which the new is identifed with value through media-
tion of the recovery and appropriation of the foundation-origin” (Vattimo
2, my emphasis). In commodity culture, the acquisition of objects permits
a “progressive development” (designated as “upward mobility”). In addi-
tion, “the new is identified with value” because it recovers and restates
one’s point of origin (nostalgia about simpler times when one had less)
while indicating how progress from that foundation-origin continues.
Joyce’s Dubliners, both in his fiction and in fact, have a curious and vexed
relationship to modernity because they are closely aligned enough with the
European economy (albeit in a colonial/imperial relationship) to partici-
pate in mass production and mass consumption, and yet disenfranchised by
poverty enough to be able to buy few “things” beyond their daily bread.
Thus Gerty sits on the beach for hours fretting about how to
increase her value by piecing together a new hat, and Molly muses ruefully
on how they don’t have enough money to “lash it around in style.” Little
Gallaher, for his part, bravely wonders if he has it in him to write poetry, to

3
Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988) 2.
170 Leonard

have great thoughts (and, indeed, he can only imagine the reviews of what
he has never written), only to find himself imprisoned by the things around
him that seem the sole evidence of his value to anyone, even though he
doesn’t really own them: “there was the furniture still to be paid for.” And
the narrator of “Araby” sets off with boundless enthusiasm, infused with a
faith he can move beyond the chaotic street market where his aunt shops,
and find something—but what?—no matter, something new, that’s for
sure, except that he runs out of money. And in what appears to be a con-
flation of ideas and things, the “useless” coins drop in his pocket, and
he becomes a “creature,” unexpectedly cast out from the accumulative
enlightenment of the Araby Bazaar and the intoxicating modernity it repre-
sents. In Dublin, when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping—but
can’t afford to buy anything—and so suffer the fracturing of their percep-
tion of “self ” which the shopping was intended to forestall.
Portrait of the Artist, seen from this perspective, is a longer version
of “Araby,” where Stephen watches his family move from smaller to smaller
houses, noting the various objects lost or pawned all along the way. But
Stephen’s loss of things also forces a more self-conscious philosophy. After
all, he is never so complacent and self-pleased as when he has his essay prize
money in hand, and uses it to set up a bank for his only too-grateful family,
keeps his pockets full of candy, repaints his room, and rides the trolley up
and down, exposing himself to as many things as possible that he might yet
buy. His progress as an artist does not resume until his progress as a con-
sumer is ended. If, as Auden claimed, Ireland hurt Yeats into writing poetry,
it seems to have hurt Stephen into producing aesthetic theory about—what
else?—objects. Stephen’s aesthetic theory is about an object as nameless, as
non-existent, and as unobtainable, as the one the narrator of “Araby” set out
to buy. When I say Stephen’s aesthetic theory is driven by a socio-economic
reality, I am arguing that modernism, and its aestheticization of the object, is
also a reaction to modernity, and not merely a representation of it.
As Luhmann has argued in Observations on Modernity: “We
understand modernity to be a release of individuality and a search for (or
despair of) authenticity made possible by this foundation. This impulse
toward modernity runs so deep that reciprocity between art production and
art theory would be unthinkable without it.” Luhmann further defines “an
individual,” in this modern sense, as “someone who can observe his or her
own observing.”4 This offers a new insight, perhaps, into why Joyce’s
4
Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998) 4.
 Hystericising Modernism 171

depiction of a young artist presents someone to us who writes almost noth-

ing. What we get instead is a modern “individual” observing his own
observing (and dragging along reluctant friends to observe him observing
his own observing). Stephen’s lack of production is not just because he is a
“young man,” but also because he is a modern “artist.” But this connection
is not apparent because Stephen is so busy translating his experience of
modernity into his theory of modernism. The truck that rumbles in front of
him, drowning out his voice as he expounds his theory to Cranly, might be
modernity itself, noisily inserting itself into the middle of his theorizing,
but to no effect. This acccords with Calinescu’s analysis of modernity as an
opposition between “the objectified, socially measurable time of capitalist
civilization” and “the personal, subjective, imaginative durée, the private
time created by the unfolding of the ‘self.’ ”5
Modernism, as aesthetic theory, appears to try and find a middle
ground between two different “modernities.” But where these two modern-
ities intersect is in the object. The center of the onion of Stephen’s theory
of the epiphany is a basket hanging in a marketplace, selected “at random,”
and while he is at pains to say the language of the marketplace is not the
language of literature, it is he who combines them in his aesthetics.
Arguably, this forging of modernism as a middle ground between the com-
modified modernity of the marketplace and the supposedly private modern-
ity of the self-reflective “individual,” is right there at the start in the
concept of Baudelaire’s flaneur. It was Benjamin who cited Baudelaire as
the first poet of modernity because Baudelaire insisted on the necessity of
the truly modern poet to immerse himself in the city, and the crowd, and
become “a kaleideoscope equipped with consciousness.”6 What we might
miss in our general notion of the flaneur, if we imagine him solely as
someone who enjoys people-watching, is that the flaneur would, without
question, while strolling about, find himself immersed in a world of
objects, which he would encounter unexpectedly and haphazardly.
Benjamin seems to suspect this occluded dimension of the flaneur
when he becomes fascinated with the Paris arcades: covered alleyways
where one would make one’s way, flanked on both sides by shop windows
crammed with umbrellas, costume jewelry, gloves, shoes. The flaneur
wanders aimlessly past randomly assembled objects. This is a telling

5
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987) 1.
6
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969) 175.
172 Leonard

subject/object paradigm that announces, as clearly as Nietzsches’s declar-

ation of the death of God, that permanent structures are no longer being
posited as the infrastructure of human experience. As Frisby notes in his
discussion of Simmel, classical sociologists of the time did see the explo-
sion of “the new” as central, and did try “to delineate that which is new in
modern society but largely failed to analyse modernity as modes of experi-
encing the new.”7
In other words, they grasped the fact that production and market-
ing had changed the literal, visible, urban landscape of the subject, and
his/her relationship to objects, but they did not realize another aspect of
modernity, inextricably linked to this objective “newness”: a new focus
upon different and competing modes of experiencing the immediate pre-
sent in modern society. What these modes of experience had in common
was a sense of “reality in flux,” reality as “differentiated and discontinu-
ous” (Frisby 78). And yet this unacknowledged shift in subjectivity clearly
registers in modernist aesthetics with its privileging of the momentary and
the simultaneous in the temporal realm, and, correspondingly, of collage
and montage in the spatial realm.
In an analagous way, Breton cited Rimbaud’s contention, “It is
wrong to say: I think. One should say I am thought.” And in his own novel,
Nadja, he rephrased the question “Who am I?” by declaring it made more
sense to ask “whom do I haunt?” Self-consciousness is no longer the con-
scious Cartesian arrangement of objects, but the Lacanian arrangement of
what the objects stimulate into something coherent, and then the misrecog-
nition of this coherency as intrinsic subjectivity. In this sense, the relation-
ship between objects and interior reflection is not unlike the relationship
between the mirror and the body in Lacan’s so-called “mirror stage.”
Indeed, Lacan’s active intellectual debate with Kleinian object-relations
theory betrays his own philosophical origins in surrealism, an aesthetic
that valorizes the unexpectedly “found” object (at a flea market for the
Paris surrealists, since the arcades of Baudelaire’s Paris are no more).
For the flaneur, the surrealist, the Lacanian subject, and the “individ-
ual” in modernity, an incoherent entity is aligned as being identical with a
seemingly coherent exterior, in order to rearrange it into a fictive unity. For
Stephen, the “semi-colonial” flaneur, the fictive unity does not cohere, even
temporarily, but, as we first see with the narrator of “Araby,” it always shatters

7
David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social
Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992) 65, my emphasis.
 Hystericising Modernism 173

into the shards of nightmarish historical juxtaposition, fracturing both the

object and the subject observing it. Wandering about, appropriately enough,
in “Wandering Rocks,” Stephen stops outside a shop window: “Dust webbed
the window and the showtrays” (U 10.801–02). The jewels inside, far from
structuring his present moment, seem to suck him backwards into undifferen-
tiated temporality: “Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil,
lights shining in the darkness” (U 10.805–06). When the structure to which he
has submitted himself fails to structure him, his sense of himself as an “indi-
vidual” observing his own observing, breaks down and leaves him unbearably
exposed to the “self ”-alienating gaze of what Lacan terms the Other: “Throb
always without you and the throb always within. … I between them. Where?
Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both.
But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can” (U 10.822–25).
Once we isolate this passage, it is easy to see how it serves as a prologue to the
shattering of the lamp in “Circe”; there, too, Stephen tries to assert an “I” in
between two swirling worlds of the “within” (the imago of his dead mother)
and the “without” (the cacophony of sight and sound in the brothel).
In a sense, the smashing of the lamp acts out the unconscious
subject/object relation kept so reassuringly at bay in the epiphany of the object
first outlined in Stephen Hero. There, the basket that served as an occasion for
Stephen’s aesthetic theory, is presented, almost obsessively one might notice,
as something with delineation, integrity and clarity. Between the world of the
sedate basket and the shattered lamp is the “I” of modernity, aestheticizing the
object on the one hand, pulverizing it on the other. In other words, the con-
scious subject organizes himself by aestheticizing the object into an example
of “modernism,” while the unconscious subject acts out the shattering effect
of discontinuous modes of experiencing the new in “modernity.” Guy
Debord’s caution about viewing the theoretical category of “structuralism” as
separate from the conditions that produce it (i.e. modernity), seems apt:
In seeking to understand “structuralist” categories, it should always be
borne in mind, as in the case of any historical social science, that
categories express not only the forms but also the conditions of existence.
… Thus it is not structuralism that serves to prove the transhistorical valid-
ity of the society of the spectacle, but, on the contrary, it is the society of
the spectacle, imposing itself in its massive reality, that validates the chill
dream of structuralism.8

8
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York. Zone books,
1995 [1967]) 22.
174 Leonard

Structuralism emerges as a category even as subjectivity shrinks,

objectivity encroaches, and the subject becomes porous to the point of no
longer constituting an identifiable entity.
But what’s bad for Cartesian subjectivity is good for the modern
“lifestyle.” If objects threaten to reveal themselves as the source of
thought, rather than the occasion for it, best to center one’s self amidst a
constellation of objects already “chosen” by us as a reflection of our
“inner” being. In this way, objects define us, but commodity culture per-
mits and encourages us to see ourselves as the “subject who knows,” or,
perhaps, “the consumer who buys,” by presenting to us, via advertising,
objects especially made as the “answer” to our desires. Even perception, as
Bergson argued, in the early days of modernity, “is never a mere contact to
the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images.”9
As a result, the experience of the present is not a cause giving away to an
effect, or one present moment replacing another, but a “duration” of the
past in the present. Or, as Game puts it, “duration as the continuous
progress of the past gnawing into the future.”10 In other words, nostalgia
masquerading as enlightenment in the case of the imperial subject—think
of Haines’s wistful musing “It seems history is to blame” (U 1.649)—and
nightmare then replacing any sense of “now” as an active category in the
case of the semi-colonial subject—think of Stephen’s rueful resignation,
“We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject” (U 16.1171).

II

Part of what I am endeavoring to do in this essay—and I can only hope to

make a start—is situate Joyce’s brand of modernism within the triangle of
“imperial,” “semicolonial,” and “colonial” subjects. The advent of
Dadaism during and shortly after World War I, for example, and the codifi-
cation of surrealism which emerged from it, has been exhaustively looked
at as a sort of teleological progression in terms of aesthetics and style. But
I view it, in more historical terms, as an aesthetic movement tracing the
decline of the Imperial subject into a “post-Imperial” subject. And I would
distinguish “post-Imperial” from the much more discussed “post-colonial”

9
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin) 170.
10
Ann Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) 97.
 Hystericising Modernism 175

by saying such a shift in emphasis traces the decentering of the Imperial

subject, rather than featuring the emergence of the post-colonial one. To
put this another way, Conrad’s depiction of the “horror” of colonialism in
the Belgian Congo is also the story of an Imperialist gone mad (Kurtz) and
another Imperialist who becomes a detached, “post-Imperial,” modernist
subject in order to save himself from the same fate (Marlow). Where Kurtz
drowns in the pool of his vast earnestness, Marlow buoys himself up with
irony and detachment.
And it is not a coincidence that, at the same time, there is an explo-
sion of popular” novels (Haggard’s She, Burroughs’ Tarzan) which stress
the innate superiority of “whiteness.” In the case of Tarzan, we are shown
that, unlike the shattered Kurtz, a British aristocrat can be dropped in a jun-
gle, raised by apes, and still emerge as a British Lord. If Kurtz represents
the reality of “post-Imperial” subjectivity, with its exquisite vulnerability
to dissolution, Tarzan is the fantasy that such a decay and decentering has
never, will never, and could never, take place. The decay of Empire and the
rise of commodity culture occurred simultaneously, and not coincidentally.
The capacity to endure the dissolution of Imperial certitude is enhanced by
the compensatory fantasies attached to commodities by mass media adver-
tising. As the external colonies so important to the imperial subject began
to give way, imperial subjects turned more and more, in a manner long-
practiced by the semicolonial subject in Joyce’s fiction, to the mysterious
manipulation of objects in order to effect a sense of internal coherence.
But this is already fully enacted by the addition of the saucer in
“Clay.” Granted, the saucer is not a “commodity” in any usual sense, but this
is my point: what Baudrillard says is true only of the commodity—that is to
say, its circulation as a sort of hysterical symptom—is already true of objects
in general in Dubliners. Especially in Ireland, there were not many “com-
modities” at the time Joyce wrote Dubliners. What we see, then, is objects as
proto-commodities already being used to prop up the semi-colonial subject,
and Joyce as a proto-surrealist, already exposing the fundamental illusion of
object-use “to focus,” as Williams said of surrealist film, “on its role in
creating the fictive unity of the human subject.”11 Likewise, the people
gathered at the party in “Clay” insist “it’s not right” when Maria’s hand
descends in a saucer not supposed to be there. And they hastily remove it,
make her go again, and “this time she got the prayerbook” (D 105). The party

11
Linda Williams, Figures of Desire (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1981) xiv.
176 Leonard

in “Clay” is not the same after the intrusion of the saucer, and it sets in
motion a peculiar “language” among objects which erupts again in the clos-
ing line of the story: “and his eyes filled up so much with tears that he could
not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell
him where the corkscrew was” (D 69). We can no longer see the same party
in the same way—even when it’s the same “again”—because our own
reliance on its normalcy in order to feel coherent has been exposed.
When Eveline contemplates leaving home, it is the objects around
her she fears to leave: “She looked round the room, reviewing all its famil-
iar objects. … Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects
from which she had never dreamed of being divided” (D 20, my emphasis).
When she grips the iron railing in terror at the close of the story, it is not
the relationship with her father she is clinging to, but the relationship with
the objects in her home which define her to herself. Despite the fact her
lover Frank “had a home waiting for her” (D 21), it contains nothing famil-
iar; and while, in brief moments of optimism, Eveline imagines herself as
an entirely different person in this projected home (“she would be some-
body”), in the end, she cannot imagine who that would be. But these
objects do not behave themselves, either. In the process of “reviewing”
them—that is isolating them and recontextualizing them—Eveline discovers,
in the style of Magritte, that the familiar object has always been strange:
“And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the
priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken har-
monium beside the colored print of promises made to Blessed Margaret
Mary Alacoque” (D 20). The sentence is as neatly arranged as the objects:
a still life, preserving for her what her life is still, even as she hovers on the
verge of changing it.
But as a result of her contemplating a plan where she will remain
“still” no longer, the arrangement breaks itself up, reveals its strangeness.
She is able to recall for herself that the photograph makes sense to her
father—“Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used
to pass it with a casual word: ‘He is in Melbourne now.’ ” (D 20–21)—but
because “she had consented to go away, to leave her home,” the objects in
her home which she has dusted for years, seem suddenly and alarmingly
devoid of content, even as her own sense of self becomes more obviously
dependent on her surroundings. In a sense, the rise of commodity culture,
which paralleled the decline of the imperial project, helped spare the imper-
ial subject from too keen an awareness of how their own subjectivity was
scheduled to undergo a rearrangement. The reason for this is the fact that
advertising touted the proliferation of objects as aids to selfhood. Soap,
 Hystericising Modernism 177

liver pills, corsets, and countless other items, were all presented as sup-
ports of subjectivity—to consume was to be.
Indeed, Deasy has already amended the territorial boast “the sun
never sets on the British empire” to a much more local (therefore individu-
ally supportable) boast: “I paid my way” (U 2.251). The imperial subject
becomes a domestic consumer, and “put but money in thy purse” becomes
the only watchword for self-preservation, because money alone will permit
the subject to buy a lifestyle for the individual home which will replace the
loss of an historically specific national consciousness as an “Imperial
Subject.” Stephen’s muttered recontextualization of this quote—“Iago”
(U 2.240)—reminds us that the very person Iago is urging to fill his purse is
also the person whose money he intends to use for his own purposes. We
can see already the difficulty for the semi-colonial subject. As an individual
in modernity, there will be a desire to consume, but this consumption feeds
the coffers of England. The Irishman who puts money in his purse in order
to consume is like Rodrigo who, likewise, saves his money, with Iago’s
encouragement, because Iago knows that, in the end, the profit will be his.
Modernity, then, is the fierce attempt to affirm identity and power
over objects in the face of the impossibility of doing so, even as the amount
and variety of objects inviting us to try, escalates with unprecedented
rapidity. If the “post-Imperial” subject eventually enters into this paradox,
Joyce’s “semi-Colonial” subject had already been surviving in this liminal
world for some time. The “post-Imperial” subject, then, is a through-the-
looking-glass version of Joyce’s “semi-Colonial” subject.
The inspiration for this thesis came about when I began looking in
depth at surrealism and felt that much of what it does, especially as regards
making objects strange and the subjects who view and desire them as
unstable, seems palpably present in Joyce as early as Dubliners. But I don’t
think Joyce is a proto-surrealist as much as I think he is a semi-colonialist, and,
by 1924, around the time of the various surrealist manifestoes, André Breton,
and most Europeans, in the wake of World War I, were semi-colonialists,
too, albeit with a strong Imperial heritage in which to take refuge. Speaking
of the Imperial-Colonial relationship as mutually constitutive, Fanon
describes it as one in which “the Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white
man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic
orientation.”12 But there is nothing in the “Negro” culture which invites the

12
Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial
Condition,” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994) 116.
178 Leonard

“white” man to use it. When African masks and other objects were used by
modernist artists, they did so with a complete disregard for their cultural
context, and, indeed, for someone like Picasso or Brancusci, or even
D. H. Lawrence, it was precisely their “acultural” quality which made them
luminous. African art became the fetishized object which guaranteed some
sort of utopic “use value” reality at the base of the modernist aesthetic. They
appeared before one not only shorn of history, but completely unadvertised,
as well. Their power derived from the fact they were objects which could
not possibly become commodities, and so they could be imagined as a sort
of ur-object anchoring all the other commodities endlessly circulating as the
hysterical symptom of capitalism itself.
“Semi-Colonial” is a way to think about any historical crisis in
“white” subjectivity. The Irish were “white” people who lost the social and
economic privileges presumably guaranteed by “whiteness,” and the
British found themselves, later, unexpectedly disinherited from this same
assumption. So, in one case a people never gained what another group lost,
but in both cases “whiteness” emerges as something less than a power unto
itself. Again, popular culture of the time reinforces the reality of this crisis
by insisting, with self-betraying vehemence, that it has never taken place.
A common motif in Haggard’s novels involves marching into an uncharted
portion of Africa, and either finding it is already ruled by “whiteness”
(She), or, when this is not the case, and white people tread where no white
people have ever trod before, the natives seem to recognize the white
people’s superiority because of their skin color. Based on this, the natives
either come forward to worship (She), or plot to destroy (King Solomon’s
Mines) these dangerously superior beings. Proving, in either case, the
“inherent” superiority of the white explorers.
What’s odd about “the Irish Question,” versus other colonies of
Britain, is threefold: first, as I’ve already suggested, the Irish people,
despite the tendency of the British press to portray them as simian, were
white. Their primary marker as “other,” therefore, was their accent and
their clothing. Both of these, as Oscar Wilde proved so well, at least for a
time, can be amended to the point where a talented Irishman can “out-
British the British,” and there is no indelible skin tone to give him away.
Added to that, while Ireland may have had an economy similar to that of
colonial India or Africa—a controlled economy where land was held by the
Imperialist force, and local culture and religion were suppressed—
nonetheless, the suppressed religion was still Christian, the suppressed cul-
ture somewhat “Western,” and the despised people easily able to decode
 Hystericising Modernism 179

the signs of British culture—whether they chose to systematically reject

them, like the Citizen or, like Gerty—the very picture of a (British) seaside
girl—ingeniously incorporate them into a strategy for financial survival.
Thirdly, and as a direct result of this, Ireland, though colonized, was
still an important market for British products in a way India and Africa were
not. The explorer Stanley, for example, brought cartons of soap into Africa,
expecting to find grateful consumers, ones who, presumably had not bathed
properly since the dawn of time, but met up instead with puzzlement or
complete indifference.13 Not only were the Africans uninterested in bars of
soap, they did not have any idea why someone would choose to cart boxes
of them through the jungle. The African natives did not seem to know what
soap was, and, when Stanley demonstrated, they understood well enough,
but, still, it was just soap. The advertising made no sense to them, and, quite
sensibly, they saw no difference between one brand and another. It was, to
them, a bit of lard and not a commodity; they already had their own fetishes.
Even if they could have understood the soap advertisements of the
time, they would have been at a loss, still, because most of the ads, inspired
as they were by general anxiety about “degeneration” and “going native,”
strenuously promised the soaps would wash away any sort of “dirt” which
threatened to darken skin color; in addition, all the different soaps were
advertised as an integral part of various bathing rituals which seemed to
offer protection against any encroaching “savagery.” From a “post-
Colonial” point of view, we would have to first note the racism of these ads,
but from a “post-Imperial” point of view, it is important to note the deep
anxiety about “whiteness.” If the ads imply dark skin  dirt  ungodili-
ness  uncivilized  available for exploitation without guilt, then “white-
ness” becomes coded as easily besmirched, and the privilege “whiteness”
signifies is no longer innate. There is a notorious soap commercial of a
black child “turning white” wherever he has been soaped, and this certainly
assumes and reinforces the goodness of whiteness, but what has not been
sufficiently noted in such images is how whiteness must be sustained by
washing, and might be “obtained” by washing, and, therefore, by extension,
could also be lost for lack of it (Kurtz is none too clean when Marlowe
finally comes upon him).

13
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:
Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990). See Richards for a discussion of Stanley’s explorations into Africa bearing
commodities.
180 Leonard

Superficially, an ad such as this would seem to maintain and

further delineate the border between civilized and “savage”; in fact, though,
the line has been erased and both “whiteness” and “blackness” threaten to
reveal themselves as constructs—the result of laws and military might, not
“blood” or “breeding.” The “soap” of capitalism is the belief in “use value”—
a fair exchange of energy expended into value earned—but profit, in the
end, is unpaid labor, no matter how creatively constructed as something
else. You scrub, and you scrub, and you still get: bring around the dollar.
Of course, the Irish were already white, and the same ad campaign
would be enticing, just as we can see that the hope of looking like a seaside
girl is all that keeps Gerty’s mind off her otherwise hopeless situation. But
how can you be more white than white? Or, to put this another way, what is
there for Gerty to scrub off ? And what’s the incentive for her to stay clean?
Both Bloom and Joyce scholars are well aware of how spotless her under-
pants are, and, in the more “savage” environs of Nighttown, she upbraids
Bloom for his voyeurism by waving a “bloody clout” and saying “Dirty
married man! I love you for doing that to me” (U 15.385). No amount of
imitating the image of a British Seaside Girl will rearrange the economic
infrastructure of Ireland, an infrastructure which assures she will never be
an appropriate love object for Reggie Wylie. Bloom purchases a bar of
soap and is aware of it, from time to time, throughout the day. In the
“Circe” chapter, where objects seem as animated as subjects, it is his bar of
soap which rises up as the centerpiece of Dublin’s ideological cosmology:
“We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the earth. I polish
the sky.” (U 15.338–39). Soap underwrites the Dublin experience, but the
experience is “semi-Colonial,” not “Imperial,” which makes the coupling
of Bloom and soap, or the Irish and commodities, an uneasy alliance
within the domain of capital.
What we can see in post-World War I Europe (the period I’m also
calling “post-Imperial”) is a similar turn to the magic of commodities to
shore up the eroded image of the imperial subject. It has been argued (by
me, as it happens) that the rapid rise of advertising as a dominant discourse
can be explained solely with reference to the rise of mass production, fol-
lowed by the rise of mass media.14 But, refining that argument further, I am
now suggesting that the decline of the Imperial subject was an apparently
separate historical phenomenon which helped create, in fact, a modern

14
Garry Leonard, Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce
(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998.)
 Hystericising Modernism 181

subjectivity particularly open to a new sort of object—an object which

appeared capable of generating subjectivity by accessing the relationship
between knowledge and desire in a way not conceived of in Cartesian phil-
osophy. Ironically, modernity brought about a fetishistic society which
imagined salvation in inanimate objects—the very activity they found as
evidence of “primitivism” in the native populations of their various
colonies. Bemused and shocked reports about the native’s use of fetishes
drifted back to England: native people seemed to worship bits of wood and
cloth, and seemed to regard them as sacred or even as inhabited by their
God or Gods. This was greeted as further evidence of the native’s inherent
inferiority and their urgent need for enlightenment (all of which provided a
pleasant countenance for the Imperial project of profiting as much as pos-
sible from cheap labor and foreign resources).
And yet the Imperial culture remained blind to its own increasingly
fetishbased economy: commodity culture. Although it is beyond the scope
of this essay, one might even go as far as to wonder if the Europeans were
influenced by the “savage” practices they so casually scorned. Certainly
Bloom immediately grasps the success of the Catholic Church in commodi-
fying the communion wafer when he drops by a Church, and his advertis-
ing instincts might have been stirred as well by witnessing tribal rituals
from the position of an outside observer. What makes Bloom a savvy
advertising man is the way he sees right past the spiritual to the socio-
logical and even the anthropological. This fetishization is so pervasive in
modernity that it permeates both the social and economic as well as the
psychological: “Late nineteenth-century bric-a-bracomania, with its
domestic altars of eroticized things, brought Freud and Marx into collu-
sion, and this connection, in turn, helped to explain the prevalent and
subtly disquieting present-day consumerist practices of collecting, hoarding,
displaying, desiring, fondling, possessing, and continually looking.”15 So
blind were they to the way their own system of mass media and advertising
invested neutral, inert objects such as soap with “magical” and sacred
properties, that they accounted for the native’s indifference to Western
fetishes as yet further evidence of their primitive nature.16 But Ireland, as I

15
Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative
Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1991) x.
16
Soap seems now to have entered the post-modern, first in such stores
as “The Bath Shop,” where we’re assured the products are no threat to the Rain
182 Leonard

have already suggested in my reference to Gerty, is enough of a participant

in Western culture to respond to the allure of commodity culture. What is
“semi-Colonial” about this response is that the Irish do not react with the
blank incomprehension of the African or Indian native, but neither do they
seem to celebrate commodities in quite the same way as continental
Europe. Gerty, for example, who would seem to be unequivocally enthusi-
astic about anything she sees advertised, nonetheless cannot afford to just
go buy it, and must, instead, piece it together for herself, hoping, once she
has put the whole package together, the “slightly shopsoiled” material will
not betray her humble origin in poverty.
The narrator of “Araby,” also, responds to the allure of commodity
culture in a positive blaze of enthusiasm, but winds up feeling crushed and
dehumanized as the Bazaar grows dark, leaving him standing amidst the
objects for sale, all of them suddenly ominous and humiliating to him.
Maria, too, spends a good deal of time picking out the perfect plumcake, and
is nearly reduced to tears when, upon her arrival, she cannot find it. We see
this subject/object ambivalence in yet another register in the “Circe” chapter,
when all the objects of Bloom’s life seem to take on a life of their own. Some,
such as the bar of lemon soap which mounts into the sky as the sun, with the
face of Sweny the chemist on it, seem to mock him in a jocular sort of way,
while other products of mass media dear to him, such as the Nymph of the
Bath, heckle and accuse him of projecting his idle fantasies on to them. The
semi-colonial subject has a guilty, furtive, and anxious relationship with the
object, one which always ends in a spasm of disillusionment.
What makes these objects so dangerous to the semi-colonial sub-
ject is the way they appear to offer unexpected relief from the daily tedium
of social oppression and occasional self-loathing, but when the purchase is
lost, or not made, or not right, the subject’s ordinary defenses are in such

Forest, and more recently, in a store I visited in downtown Toronto, where the soap
was pleasantly displayed in huge, undifferentiated, chunks. You select which kind
you want, a piece is chipped off and wrapped in a plain brown wrapper. There are
no labels or competing advertising claims between and among all the chunks of
soap, and the effect is a curious return to the pre-commodification of soap. Except
the effect is nostalgic. Paradoxically, the shop is able to sell its product for much
more than advertised soap—because it’s not advertised, and that gives it special
appeal. Use-value, Baudrillard claims, is the “alibi” for exchange value. And the
appeal of this unadvertised soap to an up-scale consumer is its nostalgic position-
ing as “just soap” in the otherwise simulacrum-saturated world of the postmodern.
 Hystericising Modernism 183

disarray that the disillusionment she feels seems to encompass her entire
life. By looking at the semi-colonial subject’s relation to objects, we see
the treachery Fanon outlined as an essential part of the experience of the
colonial subject with the “other”: “As soon as I desire I ask to be con-
sidered. I am not merely here and now, sealed into thingness. … I occupied
space. I moved towards the other … and the evanescent other, hostile but
not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea” (Fanon 118).
Fanon is talking about the “black” man when he approaches the white
man, but what is true of the “black” man in relation to the “white” other
is true of the semi-colonial “white” Irish man in relation to the British
commodity/object—moving towards a commodity, as is so clear in “Araby,”
produces a euphoric sense of escape. But as the object is approached, it
fades, then disappears. The semi-colonial subject is “caught out”—flush
with the feeling of expectation and promise, yet suddenly crushed and
disoriented by the unbearably keen awareness of the relatively hopeless life
she has been trying to ignore.

III

The “semi-colonial” subject might be distinguished from the “colonial

subject” in that, as Fanon suggests, he has no national culture to give his
identity form, but he still must cope with all the invasive techniques of
modern life (something spared the uncomprehending “colonial” subject, at
least at the turn of the century). Farrington, in “Counterparts” for instance,
goes back and forth from a brief sense of well-being (his smart comment to
his boss) followed by an acute sense of worthlessness: he’s pawned his
watch, yet has no money left because he spent it on drink, in a pub where
he lost at arm wrestling; alone now, and not even drunk, all that’s left is for
him to spend the rest of the night contemplating the next morning where he
will humiliate himself in front of his boss in the hopes of keeping a job he
despises.
So the Joycean “semi-colonial” subject struggles with modernity,
but with an added dimension of what can only be described as terror.
Whereas the surrealists deliberately break up context in order to produce
disorientation, the Joycean semicolonial subject experiences such disorien-
tation as psychic death, and has numerous strategies for trying to order the
external world in such a way as to avoid the very experience the surrealists
labor to produce. James Duffy goes so far as to arrange his books according
184 Leonard

to size. Additionally, he eats the same lunch, in the same place, every day.
As already noted, Little Chandler has grown to resent his domestic life,
but, clearly, he is afraid to venture outside of it. When he allows himself a
briefly Byronic thought about setting out to be the poet he has always fan-
tasized he might be, he brings himself back to heel by recontextualizing
himself among the objects which have grown to define him (much as he
would wish to deny this). Stephen finds “the riot of his own mind” so
exhausting and destabilizing that he seeks to order it in a sort of psychic
equivalent of Duffy’s bookshelf: “Every morning he hallowed himself
anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery … he drove his soul
daily through an increasing circle of works of superogation” (P 147).
Although the content is different, the desperation for orientation suggested
by the procedure is not so very different from walking down the road read-
ing every advertisement in each window. In both cases there is an attempt
to set up a steady, consistent, and above all, reliable external source for
internal coherence.
In Lacanian terms, there is something especially treacherous about
“the Other” in relation to whom the semi-colonial subject strives to experi-
ence a sense of identity. Although this is posited as a universal dilemma in
Lacan, Heidegger is clear that the relationship between subject and
object—our encounter with things–must be understood as a phenomenon
of western culture. As Kolb summarizes, “in a nonmetaphysical mode of
living, non-Western or post-Western, the notions of being and reality and
existence would not occupy such central roles and the understanding of
what it means for things to be revealed would be achieved in other
terms.”17 The problem for the Irish “semi-colonial” subject is that he is a
part of western culture in terms of the central role played by the relation-
ship between things and subjectivity, but he also suffers from what Fanon
has described as the devaluation of his own national culture.
Fanon goes further, and describes the colonial experience of self,
unmediated by the Imperial culture, as gradually being suppressed, by the
colonial subject himself, as dangerous, uncontrollable, and even suicidal:
“On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be con-
sidered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from
a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her
fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and

17
David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger and
After (University of Chicago Press, 1986) 131.
 Hystericising Modernism 185

from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her
child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its
own unhappiness which is its very essence.” No wonder the dislocation
from prefabricated selfhood to the evacuation of all the external supports
of a prearranged interiority feels like nothing less than death to the semi-
colonial subject; he does not merely get depressed, he disappears.
When Haines says history is to blame, it seems clear that in a
world where imperial expansion is more difficult, and contraction the
order of the day, history itself, as the teleological concept it was conceived
as being, is dead because it has been organized and understood as nothing
more or less than the ideology of “progress.” It is appropriate that, rather
than attempt a history of Irish resistance, Haines would prefer to collect
sayings of the people. In a commodity culture, history has become mar-
ketable, and so it becomes the art of the anecdote, saturated with nostalgia,
formulated as whimsy, and offered as a monument to a distant sense (there-
fore profitable) of someone else’s pain and loss. As “what happened” in
imperialism becomes harder and harder to countenance pleasantly, there is
a corresponding surge in relativism, and in the Hainesian circular notion
that “what happened” was something called “history,” and it is to blame,
but nothing more can be said since any event is pretty much the same as
any other. This leaves the semi-colonialist no choice but to experience his-
tory as dream, as nightmare, and to see no hope of ever waking.
The semi-colonial subject seems particularly fragile in his or her
relationship to the object, and much more prone to a sudden sense of
implosion when confronted with evidence suggesting it is the outside
world which has ordered one’s sense of a supposedly inviolable interiority.
When Stephen sees the word “fœtus” carved in the desk, for example, we
read, “it shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had
deemed until then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind”(P 90).
Of course this has to do with a sense of masturbation as shameful, but it’s
significant he does not view this from a more comforting perspective: as
evidence that other people have dealt with sexual thoughts and impulses.
What really terrifies him is any sense his consciousness is a “mass product”
produced by stimulation from his external environment.
Whereas the narrator of “The Sisters” mechanically reads advertise-
ments in shop windows as he walks, Stephen has the inverse reaction: sign-
posts suddenly make no sense and even “his own thoughts” seem foreign
and disorganized, requiring him to mechanically state his name and loca-
tion, like a character trying to recover from amnesia: “He could scarcely
186 Leonard

interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. … He could scarcely

recognise as his own thoughts: and repeated slowly to himself:—I am
Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon
Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the
Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and
Victoria. Names” (P 92). What is remarkable in his rapid recital of vital co-
ordinates is that he wilfully organizes them into a coherent narrative which
immediately begins to scramble itself again as soon as he stops, ending
with a helpless non-differentiating observation: “Names.”
Bloom will have a similar experience, also out on the street, when
he is making his way home after purchasing a piece of kidney for his break-
fast: “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far. … Desolation.
Grey horror seared his flesh. … Well, I am here now. Yes, I am here now.
Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of the bed. Must begin
again those Sandow’s exercises” (U 4.218–34). In this movement from
engagement to what Fanon called “nausea,” we can recognize a rhythm sim-
ilar to that of Stephen: an unexpected, terrifying emptying of the self,
almost a hemorrhaging of all the outside material the individual has
arranged into the notion of subjectivity, leaving one completely permeable.
And then, like a swimmer struggling to surface, a spluttering declaration of
spatial and temporal parameters (“Well, I am here now”) followed by a slow
rearrangement of internalized routine (“Sandow’s exercises”), and finally
back to the reorientation of subjectivity: “To smell the gentle smoke of tea,
fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes,
yes” (U 4.237–39). What I am trying to highlight as “semi-colonial” is the
way internalized images and objects of desire in the “semi-colonial” subject
have a way of evacuating themselves, which leaves the subject helplessly
confronting a terrifying sense of emptiness. No wonder the Joycean subject,
by and large, is extremely careful about what he “takes in” because he may
grow to rely upon it, and then its sudden loss—one might say its unexpected
assertion of its external origin—leaves the subject feeling like a robot devoid
of autonomy or originality, “a creature driven and derided by vanity” (D 35)
in one case (the narrator of “Araby”), or “a ludicrous, figure, acting as a
pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to
vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts” in another (Gabriel in
“The Dead,” D 220). My point is that this is not ordinary doubt but sudden,
profound, existential crisis.
When the boys of “An Encounter” play hooky from school—and
the Roman History lesson taking place there—the resulting experience is
 Hystericising Modernism 187

curiously ahistorical, as if they had escaped from the ideology of progress/

history itself. Their plan to get to the Pigeon House, for example, is never
accomplished, and the most distinctive feature of the old man’s conversa-
tion is its circularity (round and round). In Dublin, there is no history out-
side of history class. When a given ideology of history recedes, what is left
is the increased luminosity and aura of the object world. If history keeps
“things” in their place, its absence causes them to circulate in an unpreced-
ented manner. Kracauer in 1927, maintains that “surface-level expres-
sions … by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access
to the fundamental substance of the state of things.”18 Thus, in the auto-
mated high-kicking of the Berlin night club dancers, Kracauer finds the
evidence of the assemblyline with its sole emphasis on parts made inter-
changeable and devoid of autonomy: “no longer individual girls, but indis-
soluble girl clusters. … They are composed of elements which are mere
building blocks and nothing more. … The hands in the factory correspond
to the legs of the Tiller Girls. … The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex
of the rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system” (81). There
is no aspiration to rationality, nor even a confidence in a “prevailing eco-
nomic system” for the semi-colonial people of Joyce’s Dublin, and so the
“mass ornaments” are broken (the harmonium in “Eveline,” the chalice
in “The Sisters”), enigmatic (the photograph in “Eveline”), missing (the
corkscrew in “Clay”), destabilizing (the saucer of clay in “Clay”), lost
(Maria’s plumcake), or unimaginable (the non-purchase in “Araby”). It is
the day-to-day invisibility of objects in modernity which makes them
indelible artifacts of their time, and Kracauer, in an echo of Stephen’s aes-
thetic theory, expects art to take note of this: “When significant components
of reality become invisible in our world, art must make do with what is left,
for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with
reality.”
The “individual” and the “commodity” are, equally, effects of rela-
tionship, and what Zizek says of the commodity is also true of subjectivity:
“what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations
between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elem-
ents, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other
elements”19 This is particularly true in a post-Imperial modernity where

18
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995) 75.
19
Slavov Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 24.
188 Leonard

the “immediate property” of an identity as an imperial subject is dwindling

from the outside world, even as it is being shored up within. By surround-
ing one’s self with commodities, as opposed to mere objects, the subject
turns to fetishism to offset a growing sense of alienation. The aura of the
commodity consists in its ability to “invest it with the ability to look at us
in return.” But the fetish stabilizes and destabilizes at the same time.
Indeed, this is Baudrillard’s definition of the defining property of the
fetish: “Instead of functioning as a metalanguage for the magical thinking
of others, it turns against those who use it, and surreptitiously exposes their
own magical thinking”20 Sooner or later, when you play the game of
fetishization, someone slips in the clay saucer, and you’re confronted, once
again, with whatever the game was designed to hide.
University of Toronto

20
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,
trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981) 90.