Ashplant

Related topics:

Ingestion and Excretion
Irish History Transformed
Obedience and Rebellion
Union and Division
The Unspoken
Waste
Water

Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/ulysses-mired-in-the-universal/oclc/362951659&referer=brief_results

Link to full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v013/13.1horowitz.html

Horowitz attempts to uncover the ways in which Ulysses merges the particular with the universal, the realistic with the mythical. He begins by asking whether Dublin was the only possible setting for the novel, or if it speaks to a universal experience for which any city could have been a stand-in. Dublin was in an advanced state of decline at the beginning of the twentieth century—a city of disease and waste, whose sewage disposal systems lagged far behind those of other major European cities. However, Horowitz argues that if Joyce sees the exalted toilet as a symbol of cold, capitalist repression, then Dublin's defacatory decay is also a mark of human intimacy and sensuous pleasure. By not flushing their waste, Dubliners revel in "the bare materiality of local life" (875), and thus demonstrate a universal imperative "that the world once knew and now needs to relearn: how to enjoy emptying" (876).

After examining the specifics of the novel's location, Horowitz examines its presentation of the relationship between realism and mythology, concluding that these opposites work together to make Ulysses a truly modernist text. Joyce goes to extreme lengths to create the illusion that his Dublin is identical to the real, historical Dublin; however, incorporating the model of Homeric myth undermines this realism to some degree. Horowitz argues that with this tension, the novel establishes itself as the "meeting-place of the mundane and the transcendent" (870), using the material particularities of realism to reveal the sort of greater underlying structure that is the primary concern of myth. Using two lists from Cyclops (U 12) and Ithaca (U 17), he demonstrates how, much like the rest of Joyce's work, lists pile particularities on top of one another until the list either "implodes into nothingness"—an arbitrary and chaotic pile of details—or "explodes into the universal," revealing the essential principle that organizes its logic (879-80). Just as Joyce's Dublin "exploits the sensuous possibilities of its decline," so too does the modernist text achieve mythical transcendence through the bare materiality of realism (884).

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