James Joyce, the “Wonder Worker,” and Inventions

Abstract

James Joyce’s work plays a crucial role in defining what modernism is, so his stylistic experiment has been a focus to scholars and readers. But his interest in technological innovation presents another approach to the definition of modernism. Joyce deploys many innovative devices, all of which did not contribute to the progress of science. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is obsessed with troublesome constipation and its resulting piles, when he is reminded of the innovative device, the Wonder Worker, the pamphlet of which is shown to be kept in his desk drawers. Although Molly points to the male anxiety about virility by thinking of this device, the significance is increasing when it is referred to in Finnegans Wake. By associating the Wellington monument with the Wonder Worker, Joyce invokes the relationship between war ideology and phallic power. Joyce’s doubling technique is employed to associate Duke Wellington with Marquess of Willingdone, who as appointed as the Crown Governor of Bombay. The latter’s imperial policy triggered Gandhi’s hunger strike. Joyce continues to present a scandal of adultery between Duke Wellington and Harriette Wilson, thus emaciating his virility, since her biography exposed the weakness of the Duke’s sexual power. By referring to the television as “the charge of a light barricade,” Joyce invokes one of the most notorious battles, the Charge of the Light Brigade, in which 600 cavalry men were killed under the attack of cannons in the Crimean War. Joyce witnessed the climax of technological progress in the First World War, which made mass destruction of human beings possible.