History's Echo

Abstract

In the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses, Freeman's Journal editor Myles Crawford lays a hand on the shoulder of Stephen Dedalus and tells the young man, "I want you to write something for me. Something with a bite in it. You can do it. I see it in your face. . . . Put us all into it, damn its soul" (111). Critics have long identified Ulysses as that piece of writing that self-consciously executes the newspaper editor's demand, but early Joyce critics such as biographer Richard Ellmann, it is now charged, left the novel toothless rather than biting, privileging its modernist aesthetic and supposed universal humanism over its specific, political concerns. These approaches either "defang[ed]" Joyce's purported nationalism as Vincent Cheng claims in Joyce, Race, and Empire (2), or they just flat-out ignored it, attributing both to Joyce and to his work what Emer Nolan has referred to as a "benign multiculturalism" (3).