Centrifugal Joyce, or Art for Dirt’s Sake

Abstract

In response to Caren Kaplan’s critique of modernist exile, this article repurposes Bakhtinian theory as an instrument for understanding Joycean border-crossing and barrier-breaking as forms of centrifugality. It also asks whether a novelist that Bakhtin ignored might turn out to have produced the maximum expression of Bakhtin’s own ideals of novelistic representation: dialogical, carnivalesque, multi-chronotopic, body-centric, and lingo-culturally interstratified. To advance this argument, the major Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia is expanded beyond its original, intranovelistic purview to describe both the energies and the fraught complexities of exile as a motor of modernist art. A proposal for a theoretical axis linking exile, heteroglossia, and Russian Formalism leads to a discussion of obscenity as both a centrifugal and an aesthetic object for Joyce: dirt for art’s sake. And this in turn leads to an analysis of interstratified layers of representation in Ulysses as a form of heteroglossia that depends for its power on both the exilic and the affective. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that Ulysses, as a radical departure from the standard, centripetal language of earlier novels, represents the quintessence of novelistic heteroglossia, not only in its stylistics but also in spatial terms: those of the mutative, centrifugal forces represented by its global travels and the exilic image of its creator.