Storytelling and Alienated Labor: Joyce, Benjamin, and the Narrative Wording Class

Abstract

s narrative experiments in Ulysses allow readers to recognize traditional novel narration as alienated labor. In the course of narrating Ulysses, Joyce's notorious Arranger becomes aware of his own alienation from the product of his labor, as the life he has given to the novel finally "confronts him as something hostile and alien," in the words of Marx. The Arranger's alienation, consistent with the forces of capitalism to which Walter Benjamin attributes the death of storytelling, motivates his outrageous narrative behavior. This alienated behavior in turn allows Ulysses to articulate experience in ways that exceed the capabilities and capacities that Benjamin grants to traditional novels. Specifically, the Arranger's labor and death absorb the fragments of living and immediate experience represented in the novel into a scheme of epic memory that transforms modernity's jolts and shocks into something communicable and gives Ulysses its unparalleled sense of life " lived."