Esprit de corps[e]: Joyce, Ulysses, and the Body

Abstract

Throughout his writing James Joyce fashions a sweeping display of corporeal realities shaped by contemporary social, economic, and political conditions. In examining bodies framed by such tropes as impoverishment, addiction and disintegration, illness and disease, corruption and constraint, fragmentation and decay, and enhancement and masking, this thesis argues that in Joyce’s writing the body is constructed in terms of lack. It further argues that Ulysses registers an experience of modernity that grounds itself in the fragmented and decaying body, and it is this body defined by its absences that proves to be particularly applicable to Ulysses. The central question asked is: How might we read Ulysses as an “epic of the human body” (qtd. in Budgen 21)?

Identifying the body-society relationship as the core concern of sociological work, Chris Shilling adopts a corporeal realist approach to reading the body as “a medium for the constitution of society” (20). Shilling’s theory of corporeal realism takes into account that social action is embodied and must be recognised as such, but also that social structures condition and shape embodied subjects across innumerable social arenas. The human body is thus understood as being both generative of the emergent properties of social structures and a location of their effects. This approach puts the body at the centre of its concern with social practices and structures, offering “an analytical way of gaining access to and examining the flux of socio-natural life” (20). In writing the body in terms of health, food, medicine, religion, sociality, popular culture, and technology, Joyce formulates a body world that is profitably read on these terms.