[In this essay, Reizbaum regards Joyce as a minor writer in the sense that his work is resistant to easy classification and interpretation.]

In a way we've been saying it for years—Joyce is a minor writer. Perhaps it is presumptuous to implicate anyone but myself in this provocative claim—provocative, at the very least, because the work seems demoted or devalued through what could be read simply as a traditional association with the idea of minor; but though I may be among only a few prepared to use the terminology, many of the, in particular, recent readers/critics of Joyce, I would argue, have been meaning what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and a succession of others have been saying when they speak of a “minor literature.” When we speak of Joyce as disruptive, I believe we mean that the work is radically resistant to classification and interpretation, even if at once susceptible to these precisely because of the exhaustive nature of such resistances and disruptiveness and the wish to contain and delimit (nothing seems to stick or everything does); when the formal and linguistic dimensions/innovations of the text are placed in their political contexts, we are pointing to what its theoreticians identify as eminently characteristic of the minor: a (self-reflexive) refusal to be productive in a conventional/canonical sense, through its narrative, its constitution of the subject, or its use of language. Now in order to claim this, I have not only to delineate the notion of minor in terms of Joyce's work, but also to explain why it is possible to dismiss or at least qualify the work's susceptibility to the processes of canonization and, on the other hand, why in doing so I am not also rendering Joyce politically suspect, at least, if not bankrupt. After all, one criticism that has been lodged against the claim of minorness in this critical sense is that it not only valorizes but also privileges the condition of secondariness; another emerges from the critique of deconstruction—the dynamic of resistance, it is argued, obfuscates political responsibility. As I have argued elsewhere, with respect to Joyce's interaction with a writer like Djuna Barnes, in order for Joyce's work to have had the history I claim for it here, it has had to be mis- and perhaps even un-read.¹ Joyce's response to being misread/canonical seems to have been Finnegans Wake, which has been (un)read “best”; it remains a minor work in a major way, at once relegated to secondariness by the canonmasters and widely acknowledged as heuristically anticanonical.

But first to Deleuze and Guattari, who, in their work on Kafka, have laid out the theory of a minor literature. My peculiar configuration of the minor as it pertains to Joyce is additionally informed by other proponents of the concept such as David Lloyd and Louis Renza.² Deleuze and Guattari derive their notion of a minor literature from a diary entry in which Kafka foregrounds a relationship between politics and literature generally by pointing to the immediately political nature of that which has been considered conventionally minor—secondary, lesser in comparison to what has been upheld as the canonical ideal (December 25, 1911). He refers specifically to the condition of Czech Jews who write in German, thereby creating a literature dynamically different in, at least, cultural and linguistic terms from that of their German counterparts.³ Deleuze and Guattari extend and formalize Kafka's ideas by outlining three characteristics of a minor literature: the deterritorialization of language; the connection of the individual to a political immediacy; and the collective assemblage of enunciation (18). And while the terms of these writers are characteristically difficult to translate and/or to gloss, I find the stated and derived import of the concepts immensely useful, both in providing at least a partial terminology for a representation of Joyce's literary practices and in creating a theoretical context for a discussion and definition of what has come to be known as the postcolonial or minority text. Deleuze and Guattari propose that it is only through such a concept as the minor that we can begin to sort out what has been left out:

There has been much discussion of the questions “What is a marginal literature?” and “What is a popular literature, a proletarian literature?” The criteria are obviously difficult to establish if one doesn't start with a more objective concept—that of minor literature. Only the possibility of setting up a minor practice of major language from within allows one to define popular literature, marginal literature, and so on. … Only in this way can literature really become a collective machine of expression and really be able to treat and develop its contents.

(18-19)

In all three of the designated characteristics, we see the expression of and the reconceptualization of literary value in terms of the anti-ideal(ized). In the first instance, the idea of the deterritorialization of language is based on the principle of a minor usage of language, which emerges from the state of being “like a foreigner in one's own language” (119)—as in the (m)other tongue of the postcolonial subject, one might say. This becomes a kind of defamiliarization process, where language is reflective of the condition of the speaker/writer. This position or condition of the minor subject instantiates the second characteristic whereby the relationship between the individual and political realities are experienced/articulated as interdependent. From Kafka's idea here that a minor literature “serves as the ethnic group's collective life,”⁴ Deleuze and Guattari guard/theorize against a kind of totalizing national (de)limitation of the minor, even though the (minority) national or the cultural or the ethnic becomes a determinative criterion—“We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (18), and they thereby reiterate the idea of the minor usage of a major language. Through the last characteristic, Deleuze and Guattari provide a critique of the humanistic subject and by extension the master/canon.

But above all else, because collective or national consciousness is “often inactive in external life and always in the process of breakdown,” literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.

(17)

While he has certain reservations, Lloyd praises their work for providing a means by which to foreground the politics of culture or, more specifically, the “hegemony of central cultural values” (Nationalism 5).

I want to talk about Joyce's work as minor in the contexts of modernism and nationalism, in the first case because of the way in which at least a certain apprehension of modernism(s) not only conforms to, but illustrates the characteristics of the minor as they have been outlined here—as disruptive, anti-ideal, radical; Lloyd admonishes, however, that “[i]f minor literature belongs in the general field of modernism, it does so only as the negative critical aspect of modernism” (Nationalism 23). This observation is significant to the recent revisions of modernism in which the “major paradigms” associated with writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats have been set against the literary aims of other writers identified with the movement. The relevance of nationalism here has to do not only with the particular cultural/ethnic dimension of a minor literature, but, more specifically, with the way in which Joyce's ascription or ascension to the modernist aesthetic and thereby to the canon determined his national(ist) position and positioned him in relation to modern Irish writing—as a delinquent or distant relation, one might say.⁵ In that my own reading of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the minor in these terms has been closely informed by Lloyd's work, I quote from him extensively here:

Radical modernism has been conceived as the critique by art of the institution of art, a definition that would certainly hold for its extreme manifestations in dada and surrealism. … In the general field of modernism, minor literature emerges as writing out the marginalization that afflicts aesthetic culture, and as extending, in writing it out, that condition of marginality. Rather than shore up the notions of subjectivity that underpin canonical aesthetics, and rather than claiming still to prefigure a reconciled domain of human freedom in creativity as even surrealism does, a minor literature pushes further the recognition of the disintegration of the individual subject of the bourgeois state, questioning the principles of originality and autonomy that underwrite that conception of the subject. In doing so, it plays out the contradictions that afflict late capitalist society through its paradoxical modes, refusing to offer the possibility of reconciliation. Minor literature adheres constantly to a negatively critical attitude.

Among the contradictions thrown up by the bourgeois state is that effect of hegemony already noted, namely, that the extension of colonial hegemony requires the creation of an educated native elite without the guarantee that mastery of the instruments of domination will assure assimilation. In the political sphere this has entailed the national liberation struggles of this century and the production of structural dependency as a further extension of hegemonic control. In the domain of culture, the effect of hegemony has been to produce a writing of the colonized that increasingly calls the coherence of the canon into question. What the current crisis, both for canonicity and for the definition of the object of literary studies, involves is the deferred recognition of the end of the canon itself as a viable normative institution. That crisis registers, if only symptomatically, the end of a conception of subjectivity that minor literature itself narrates.

(Nationalism 24-25)

For Joyce's work, this intersection of the national(ist) (they are not necessarily interchangeable but often are in the context of Ireland) and the modernist becomes (at least) a double bind; an Eliotic high-culture aesthetic demands an extraction from and lack of interest in the cultural field (from the Irish one, at any rate), a writing of so-called “internationalism,” while the Irish mainstream, constituting itself increasingly as nationalist, rejects or is alienated by Joyce's work for its modernism or what modernism has made (of) it.⁶ It seems that modernism and nationalism have read Joyce in the same way, preventing him from becoming minor in a conventional sense; and from becoming, on the other hand, a major contributor to the cultural politics of his generation (or minor in this new critical sense). In the reconsiderations of modernism(s), it has often been argued that modernism paradoxically participated in or reinscribed the mainstream culture while seeming to challenge it—culture's subordination to an aesthetic ideal was mistaken for its undoing or unwriting, while a rendering of the decadence of culture was in fact synonymous with a lament for a lost ideal. Similarly, Lloyd argues that nationalism itself can become a means of maintaining cultural hegemony in its dependence on and assimilation to the apparatuses of the colonizing power.⁷ Joyce, too, sees this ironic relation, or, at least, his work evinces it. I will argue that Joyce's work is modernist and national(ist) in this minor way, a way that radically critiques an idealized authority or subject in either an aesthetic or national sense.

While the “Cyclops” episode is often used to illustrate the problematics of cultural identity and the nationalist impulse, it is the constellation of episodes around (and including) it that seem to realize in a concentrated way a kind of minor expression of modernist and nationalist issues. From “Sirens,” whose overture is “done” with the strains of Robert Emmet's epitaph of deferral, through the ascension of Bloom to self-righteousness at the close of “Cyclops,” on through the chimed and resonating cuckoos of “Nausicaa,” and finally with the lingual pyrotechnics at the end of “Oxen,” the repetition of the subject(s) of composition directs us to examine the implications and ramifications of cultural, sexual, and linguistic difference.⁸ Each episode repeats and examines the dynamic relation between the major and the minor, the marginal and the dominant, the canonical and the uncanonical in these terms, but in a way that seems to disrupt the binary relation; opposites do not prevail nor even finally align. What are the relative positions of power, after all, between Emmet and Boylan, the citizen and Bloom, Bloom and Gerty, the Anglo-Saxon text and the speech of Alexander J. Dowie, not to mention the parodic or demystifying presentation of each heroic element or figure?⁹ One might argue that all the pressing issues of cultural, sexual, and textual integrity have been sacrificed to the aesthetic, that what prevails or connects them all is modernist innovation/Joycean ingenuity (the symphonic/notational element of “Sirens,” the parodic counterpoint of “Cyclops,” the romantic novelization and shifting narratives of “Nausicaa,” the stylistic display of “Oxen”). And in the drama everything—narrativity, subjectivity, language, the text itself—like Robert Emmet's epitaph,¹⁰ seems deferred: Emmet's subjectivity, as Lloyd has pointed out (Nationalism 71), is assimilated to the nationalist ideal, Gerty's sexuality to the gender ideal, Bloom's Jewishness to the cultural ideal, the English language, such as it is, to the canonical ideal. In each case, however, continuously and interactively, we have the dramatization of the processes of idealization, universalization, aestheticization; the text becomes “cuckoo”—displaced or out of place, perhaps, but not in deference to a higher ideal. Again, like Emmet's epitaph, which is de facto written (dramatizing sacrifice) despite its admonition and regardless of Ireland's status as nation, Joyce's text takes a (minor) stand, admonishing its readers at the end of “Oxen” to “try it on” (“Just you try it on”—U [Ulysses] 14.1591) either before or at the same time that “Circe” does it for us.

O.K., so everything and everyone is cuckoo; may “cuckoo” in both its conventional and Joycean sense as “abnormal” be seen as synonymous with minor? It might be that what is achieved is what Lloyd calls the “radical non-identity of the colonized subject” (Nationalism xi), his way of describing what registers as a kind of “inauthenticity” or lack of integrity in or about the work of a writer like James Clarence Mangan; both the writer and the work are and/or treat “colonized subjects.”¹¹ In fact, what seems like inauthenticity derives from a refusal to be assimilated to any major paradigm. In this sense (at least), these episodes from Ulysses conform to criteria 1 and 3 of Deleuze and Guattari's characterization of the minor in that they appear to deterritorialize language and to collectivize rather than hierarchize experience. But what of criterion 2? One might still be nagged by a persistent question, one that Joseph Valente asks in his article on “The Politics of Joyce's Polyphony”—what of “effective political action” in or in response to this textual drama?¹² Is the question of national identity, for example, undermined, belittled, effectively neutralized by this minor treatment? And, despite the play, the disruption within it of hegemonic values, is the play finally undone by the idea that the “minor was proved by the major,” as Bloom purportedly responds in “Ithaca” to the question of redemption from social or human ills (U17.1101-02). To put it another way, do our conceptualizations of the idea of the minor even in its most radical sense ultimately return to the major paradigm for definition, or, to put it still another way, is the text reterritorialized, “recuperated into performing a major function”? In Kafka's conception of the minor, it was a medium where conflicts are articulated without being resolved, and Lloyd reinforces this idea and Deleuze and Guattari's definition of political immediacy by divorcing any minor expression from a wish to play a “prefigurative and reconciling role” (Nationalism 23). There are many ways to respond to what might be apprehended as at best politically ineffectual: to recognize, for instance, that the minor emerges from a particular cultural and historical moment and that in some sense it seeks or creates the conditions for its own dissolution or obsolescence.¹³ Perhaps this can be said of the “best” kind of modernism and nationalism; perhaps it can be said of a work like Ulysses.

The question of effective political action haunts the relationship between Joyce and Irish writing. Much of the modern Irish writing establishment has not been talking to Joyce because, they might say, he does not speak to them. At the same time, as I have argued elsewhere, much of that writing has been mired in the (first) condition of the minor: aspiring to the standards of an outside canon with any realization of that aspiration always a reminder of its “failure”; creating itself in other ways as in the eye of the (be)holder—that is, reproducing a mythologized Irish subject forged by the colonizer; or constituting itself as oppositional and nationalist, most often thereby compulsively repeating the very dynamic it wishes to disrupt by creating a fixed oppositional identity determined by that opposition.¹⁴ As Lloyd argues, a proposition with which I agree, these first conditions of the minor, the state of or remedial response to being excluded, do not necessarily produce the second “definitive” condition of the minor, that which he claims for Mangan and I have been arguing for Joyce's work—work that by virtue of being not only unsettling but also (territorially) unsettled—stands as a challenge to this kind of (pre)occupation of contemporary Irish writing.

There are a few who do, however cautiously, perhaps unconsciously, or sometimes unself-consciously, demonstrate a sense of ancestral relation with Joyce. The historical characterization of Joyce as apolitical, disinterested, coupled with and/or read from his literary portrayals of national (and sexual) issues, reminds us of the historical imperative for all Irish writers and may bring to mind most immediately a writer like Seamus Heaney. Heaney, who lately has been taken to task inside Ireland for his particular (poetic) positions on the national(ist) question, seems to subscribe to, even recreate, in a poem like “Station Island,” for instance, this historical characterization of Joyce as being remote from what he calls “That subject people stuff.”¹⁵ He also appears to emulate that position. He invokes Joyce as a father/creator and seems to suggest an inevitability about the need to create and/or conjure him, exhorting him for permission to, as he puts it there, “step free into space,” “take off from here,” not do “the decent thing” (section XII). He addresses here a subject about which his writing and his Irish audience obsess (the audience obsesses about their own and Heaney's political position in particular): queries and confusion about his cultural position, political commitment, and artistic responsibilities to a national(ist) vision. His invocation of Joyce suggests a kind of oedipalization of that ancestral relation, which can be construed in Bloomian terms or in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense of the political. His recognition that “subject people stuff” is a “cod's game” is not necessarily to be released from it, to be “set free,” as is proposed or perhaps wished for in the poem; you might say that his work is about the risk of becoming minor.

Part of Heaney's obsession is with the issue of language, specifically the Irish use of the English language. This is the subject of Brian Friel's Translations that, by virtue of the context it establishes (the Irish hedge school in pre-famine Ireland) and its play of language, enacts the history of territorializations and deterritorialization—the take-overs and re-takes, the geography of language. It seems that Joyce has in some way a “minor” influence here too since the text does not take or, at least, worries the nationalist position as regards the English language. Of course, any suggestion of “minor status” in any sense of that idea for either Heaney or Friel will provoke any number of debates. And in the debates, undoubtedly the names of writers like Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and Brian Coffey would be invoked as modernist and minor, as more effectively marginalized by the Irish literary establishment. Would they be adducing their marginal relation to Irish literature as a testimony to the degree of their minorness? One might wonder whether the mettle of one's minorness is proven by the measure of canonical failure.

While I have been arguing that Joyce as “minor” literary ancestor stands as a kind of challenge to canonical (pre)occupations in contemporary Ireland, I would turn to certain women writers and thinkers in Ireland, who by forging a dialogue between feminism and nationalism, stand in line, providing a minor response to a major preoccupying force. I am thinking of writers like Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Albhe Smyth, and filmmaker Pat Murphy, who are challenging the prefiguring and sometimes disfiguring force of nationalism (for example, the idealization of Ireland in figures of the feminine).¹⁶ Though gender is not directly in the purview of Deleuze and Guattari, it should be clear that minorness may be determined by sex as well as ethnic or national configurations, especially if, as Caren Kaplan points out, one sees the condition of minorness as having to do with subject position rather than essences, especially in the context of a (post)colonial culture like Ireland, where the other Deleuzian-Guattarian conditions for the creation of the minor obtain.¹⁷ Certainly a writer like Boland, for example, is concerned with issues of language and history and the way in which gender figures (in) them, and despite attempts to fix—reterritorialize—her work, I believe it eludes them precisely because of its minor usage of major paradigms. So many of her poems “wish to prove” “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” that “We are Human History. We are Not Natural History,” or to see what is “Outside History”—to name just a few of her titles.¹⁸ Joyce's treatment of these issues seems to me to resonate in these women writers' compelling participation in the debate between gender and culture.¹⁹ They are not asking to replace the national(ist) literature, but to be heard by a literary milieu that has been remarkably resistant to the voices and achievements of women; they are investigating the nationalist imperative as one precondition for such dismissiveness; they are calling for a reformulation of what it means to be “acceptable” in nationalist, cultural, and/or literary terms, a reformulation of the poetic voice and the subject position.

Not all women writing in Ireland are addressing the issue of the relationship between gender and culture or nationalism, just as not all Irish writers are minor. Many of these women (and minor) writers might be less than receptive, even vigorously object to Joyce as an informing figure, as having a sexual politics that is truly conversant with or congenial to feminist writing in Ireland today. I am speaking of resonances here, of studies and dramatizations of cultural politics that correspond to the critique of nationalism by feminists and cultural critics like Lloyd. After all, in a consideration of the relations between sex and “race,” Ulysses demonstrates that the likes of Molly and Bloom occupy at least analogous subject positions.

And so I am contending that Joyce and some of his Irish descendants are on speaking terms, even if they are not always speaking exactly the same language. What I am saying is that we should read them all as minor in a less major way.

Notes

1. Marilyn Reizbaum, “A ‘Modernism of Marginality’: The Link Between James Joyce and Djuna Barnes,” New Alliances in Joyce Studies: “When it's Aped to Foul a Delfian,” ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 179-89.

2. Along with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), see Louis A. Renza's “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), and David Lloyd's Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987). Further references to Deleuze and Guattari will be cited parenthetically in the text. References to Lloyd's book will be cited parenthetically as Nationalism. While Joyce is mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari as exemplary, his name curiously does not appear in the index. They contrast Joyce with Beckett, for example, accounting, as they do, for the greater susceptibility of Joyce's work to reterritorialization: “But the former [Joyce] never stops operating by exhilaration and overdetermination and brings about all sorts of worldwide reterritorializations. The other [Beckett] proceeds by dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities” (19).

3. See generally Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 16-27. Their terminology is often slippery, impressionistic. For example when they refer to the Germans as an “oppressive population” and to German as a “paper language,” they are taking for granted a certain linguistic and ethnic distinctiveness that may be at once challenged by the very categories they establish. They use terms like “artificial,” “talent,” and “primitive” without really accounting for their valencies. And while one has to make allowances for certain integral groupings in order to further and establish certain theoretical propositions, they seem a bit glib. This slipperiness also applies to ideas like deterritorialization and territorialization; “Deleuze and Guattari themselves admit that there is a fine line between territorializing and deterritorializing processes, and it is easy for their work to be appropriated to the most divergent and even contradictory of ends” (Dana Polan, Introduction, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. xxvi). They omit altogether a consideration of the purposiveness of minor literature, except where they quote from Kafka. For a good discussion of the agency of a minor writer, see Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” in the first volume of the special issues of Cultural Critique, cited below in note 5.

4. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 116.

5. See Cultural Critique, 6 and 7 (Spring and Fall 1987), special issues devoted to “The Nature and Context of Minority Literature,” ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, especially David Lloyd's “Genet's Genealogy: European Minorities and the Ends of the Canon,” (pp. 161-85), where, along with his discussion of the susceptibility of nationalism to the hegemonic project, he compellingly outlines a distinction between minority literature and minor literature as informed by Deleuze and Guattari's idea of a deterritorialized language—a minor usage of a major language; see also Kaplan's piece (pp. 187-98) which helps to bring gender into the discussion, and R. Rhadhakrishnan's “Ethnic Identity and Poststructuralist Difference” (199-222—all of these in 6), which provides one counterpoint to Nancy Hartsock's “Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories” (7—187-206).

6. Though national and nationalist should not be interchangeable, they often are in some respects in the context of colonial or postcolonial cultures. Certainly the nationalist imperative in Ireland has governed the modern literary establishment, though there are distinctions in this regard between the North and the Republic. Such governances are being reevaluated within the contemporary milieu, just as modernism as a monolithic movement has undergone a process of reevaluation and redefinition. When I use a small case “m,” I mean to signal the potential within this critical and literary orientation for a number of different approaches, so that the distinction between writers like Eliot and Joyce may be apprehended. Nationalism, too, has been bifurcated, assigned different values so as to attempt to account for the difference between what is potentially oppressive and what is liberating. Lloyd discusses the continuum on which he sees these different nationalisms.

7. All of these theoreticians of the minor invoke the oedipal paradigm as a way of both representing the dynamic between major and minor and demonstrating the minor variation on this psychodynamic: Deleuze and Guattari discuss Kafka's idea here—“When Kafka indicates that one of the goals of a minor literature is the purification of the conflict that opposes father and son and the possibility of discussing that conflict, it isn't a question of an Oedipal phantasm but of a political program” (p. 17); Lloyd, too, refers to this paradigm as a way of discussing the potential within such representations to invert and therefore reproduce rather than alter the relation of the major and the minor—“While both Freudian and Lacanian analyses open out continually from the subjective domain to ones that are ethical, political, and, in the fullest sense, aesthetic, what is revealed in the very structure of those discourses that aim to produce a transcendent or autonomous subjectivity is the figure of a subject forever indebted to the other who constitutes him” (Nationalism, p. 172).

8. As the translator of Kafka points out, and as Lloyd acknowledges but does not treat or remedy, Deleuze and Guattari do not really consider gender in their concept of the minor: “for all their talk of devenir-femme, a becoming-woman, Deleuze and Guattari tend to abstract this process away from any tie to the historically specific situation and struggle of women” (Polan, p. xxvi). In his study of Sarah Orne Jewett, Renza certainly brings gender into consideration, though as Lloyd suggests, “Renza defers analysis of the ideological function of the canon and therefore also blurs the distinction that continually haunts his work, that between a radically minor literature and one that is still seeking to ‘fill a major function’” (Nationalism, pp. 4-5). Kaplan's article in Cultural Critique (6) reads gender into the conceptualization of the minor, something which I believe, as I will discuss below, Joyce's work demonstrates.

9. “Minor modes of writing, as the utterance of those excluded from representation, tend to undermine the priority given to distinctive individual voice in canonical criticism. They adopt, instead, modes of writing that are nonoriginal and anaclitic even in their parodic mimicry of the major work, and in doing so commence the questioning of the founding principles of canonical aesthetic judgments” (Nationalism, p. 23).

10. Here is the text of Emmet's final words to the court that condemned him to death in 1803: “Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dares now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.”

11. Lloyd, of course, takes up Mangan's piece, “Dark Rosaleen,” which has become exemplary of the Irish nationalist ballad, to illustrate the, in fact, tenuous relationship between the nationalist and the minor. He argues that it dramatizes rather than promotes or instantiates the nationalist vision: “The tonal pattern of ‘Dark Rosaleen’ repeats formally the suspension of the speaker's desire around the apotheosized woman in whom ‘life, love and saint of saints’ (stanza 3) are condensed, a suspension which is echoed in the verbal dominance of futures which are almost conditionals. In this respect, Mangan's poem becomes the great nationalist ballad it has been taken to be: not as an exhortation, but as a representation of the asymptotic progress of the nationalist project toward an idealized land whose domain is always the future. The perception of the stasis or suspension at the core of this process is peculiarly Mangan's (Nationalism, pp. 87-88). Though one could make the same claim about Joyce's work—that it dramatizes this vision—the patent parody and/or mockery has been read as anti-nationalist, synonymous with modernist, while Mangan's becomes romantic.

12. In his use of the Bakhtinian model of the polyphonic novel to discuss the “politics” of Joyce's work, Valente unwittingly demonstrates Bakhtin's complementarity with the concept of the minor, while he makes an argument for, as he puts it, the “iridescent irony” in Joyce's own declaration that he cared nothing for politics—“The Politics of Joyce's Polyphony,” in New Alliances in Joyce Studies: “When it's Aped to Foul a Delfian,” ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 56-69. This is a question often asked in contemporary critical considerations of postmodernism with varying responses. Several writers in the special issues of Cultural Critique address this: For instance, in the introduction to 7, Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd argue the following—“The study—the production—of minority discourse requires, as an inevitable consequence of its mode of existence, the transgression of the very disciplinary boundaries by which culture appears as a sublimated form with universal validity. This makes it virtually the privileged domain of cultural critique. Taken in this sense, minority discourse becomes capable of transcending its relegation and recuperation as ideological compensation, precisely insofar as within it theoretical reflection and transformative practice become, at least at the level of institutional formations, one and the same” (9). Hartsock very provocatively challenges such assertions through her critique of the postmodern and/or the theory of the minor: “Somehow it seems highly suspicious that it is at this moment in history, when so many groups are engaged in ‘nationalisms’ which involve redefinitions of the marginalized Others, that doubt arises in the academy about the nature of the ‘subject,’ about the possibilities for a general theory which can describe the world, about historical ‘progress’” (Cultural Critique, 196).

13. “What the current crisis, both for canonicity and for the definition of the object of literary studies, involves is the deferred recognition of the end of the canon itself as a viable normative institution. That crisis registers, if only symptomatically, the end of the conception of subjectivity that minor literature itself narrates. If minor literature brings us to the end of that conception of subjectivity and of representation, which is also its conceptual limit, it may be that in turn the emergence of a Third World and post-colonial literature begins to constitute a literature of collectivity for which the canon as an institution and representation as a political and aesthetic norm would be irrelevant. Such a literature would entail the end of a minor literature just as it entails the end of canonicity, ironically at the very moment at which it has become possible for both to become distinct objects for criticism” (Nationalism, p. 25). Lloyd's argument here constitutes a certain response to Hartsock's queries (above); and it reminds us of the distinction between minor and minority literature that Lloyd makes elsewhere in which the cultural and historical conditions and their effect on language make for different kinds of products and potential. One might apply this question of subjectivity to Bloom's position in “Cyclops”—can there be cultural identification or collectivity which survives the kind of disruption of the subject position that the episode performs? That disruption within the episode points to the difference between the idea of essence or ethnicity and the political position; in her essay, Kaplan argues that it is the latter that determines the minor and the minor response. In this analysis, the episode would promote, while realizing the historical reasons for the positionality of both the Citizen and Bloom, the need for a change of those subject positions.

14. I discuss the contemporary Irish writing establishment in terms of nationalism and canonicity in “Canonical Double Cross: Scottish and Irish Women's Writing,” Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “British” Literary Canons, ed. Karen Lawrence (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992).

15. Seamus Heaney, Station Island (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 93; section XII of the poem “Station Island” (below) appears on pp. 92-94. See also Darcy O'Brien's “Piety and Modernism: Seamus Heaney's ‘Station Island’,” JJQ, 26 (Fall 1988), 51-65, where he discusses Heaney's invocation of Joyce in the poem and Joyce as literary ancestor.

16. Eavan Boland, for instance, writes about this historical figuration of Ireland in “The Woman Poet in a National Tradition,” Studies 6, 302 (1987), 148-58, and in her pamphlet, A Kind of Scar: the woman poet in a national tradition (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989).

17. See notes 5 and 13 above for further citational reference on this topic.

18. Quoted from “The Science of Cartography Is Limited,” Poetry Review, 81 (Summer 1991), 11. The other titles are of poems in the collection, Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), pp. 44, 50.

19. One resonance that I have traced in the work of Joyce and in that of a writer like Boland is registered around the issue of betrayal—palpably a feature of what is minor—in both the sense of what is undermined or limited and of what is revealed. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), Deleuze and Guattari take up the issue of betrayal in (resonant) relation to Jews. See Bogue's discussion of this in Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 140-45.