By Grant Wei
(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American makes a street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I. O. U’s, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected.)
The wealthy American, symbolic of Joyce’s conceptions of the capitalist class, references Marx’s ideas regarding class struggle. In Bloom’s bizarre hallucination of “[becoming] a mother,” the “wealthy American” acts as a stereotypical capitalist who profits off of Bloom’s labor without making any contributions to the creation process himself (Joyce 390). Through introducing the principle of the capitalist class through the act of the wealthy American collecting capital parallels the irony of Ulysses being introduced in the United States: “Joyce certainly wanted copyright protections for Ulysses when it was pirated in the United States by Samuel Roth in the twenties; he also understood that copyright was really the right of shit (copri echoes the Greek kopros, dung). The most valuable part of Joyce’s work is the part that has no value, that cannot be measured by any monetary standard or aesthetic norm; and the refusal of value makes this work obscene and, therefore, in the US law that Roth took advantage of, not subject to copyright” (McGee 237). Similar to the wealthy American, Roth profited off of Ulysses as a capitalist without taking part in its creation. Taking advantage of Bloom’s “prostituted labour,” the wealthy American represents the Marxist stereotype of the capitalist (Joyce 382). Through creating a image of exploitation, Joyce inserts a bit of Marxist thought into perceptions of class in Ulysses.
The concept of originality introduces the question of the value of the Gabler edition of Ulysses. As a copy text, “[Gabler’s Ulysses’] authority as copy lies in its originality as signature. In Gabler’s edition, the copy text is not a simulacrum of an original that it enables us to recover; it is the original from which all other reading texts, including the one Joyce must have intended for the first edition, are derived (McGee 36). Joyce, as the creator of Ulysses dictates the use-value of the text, as “use-value relates an object back to the immediate needs of the subject or subjects who produced it” (McGee 36). Gabler, on the other hand, dictates the “socially symbolic” exchange-value, which Marx describes, “‘the use-value of a thing is realized without exchange, i.e. in the direct relation between the thing and man, while inversely, its [exchange]-value is realized only in exchange, i.e. in a social process’” (McGee 36). But, reconciling the two values, the “‘truth’ about the relation between these terms emerges in the postmodern era after a structural evolution in which ‘referential value is nullified, giving the advantage to the structural play of value’” (McGee 44). Joyce, as the artist, is subject to“the condition of art, including Joyce’s art, is free or disposable time, which, under capitalism, derives from the exploitation of human labor” (McGee 249).
The quantification of all activities within a different definition of value “brings every form of human activity, including aesthetic activity, under the control of capital as the general productive power of the social individual” (McGee 249). In fact, the commercialization of Bloom’s abnormal childbirth by the wealthy American support the claim that “capital transforms the whole of society into a factory” (McGee 239 - 240). In response to the commercialization of every facet of society including art and people, “[Joyce] addresses a common human subject that includes both the oppressor and the oppressed and speaks to the liberation of both from the system that produces them” (McGee 232). Similar to Marx’s vision of a social utopia, Joyce also “suggests in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that the signs of hope for social transformation (as opposed to social destruction) lie precisely inside rather than outside the field of capitalist culture” (McGee 231 - 232). In summary, through creating the image of a wealthy American who profits without creating, “Joyce explores the way individual people in a capitalist society become commodities — even to the extent, in the penultimate chapter, of giving us the exact monetary worth, or exchange-value, of Mr. Leopold Bloom (McGee 222). Mirroring many defining features of industrialization, Joyce critiques the capitalist class with his depiction of the wealthy American.
Works Cited
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter. Gabler, Garland, 1986.
McGee, Patrick. Joyce beyond Marx: History and Desire in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. University Press of Florida, 2001.