The Politics of Names in Ulysses

Abstract

Focusing on one of the most salient aspects of linguistic politics, the politics of naming, Mecsnóber establishes a parallel between the fictional migrations and name changes connected to the family of Leopold Bloom, the Dublin-born protagonist of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, and real historical processes in the Europe that the writer knew. Starting with readings of accounts of the names and migrations of Bloom’s ancestors in “Circe” and “Ithaca,” the Mecsnóber explores the context of Jewish assimilation and European nationalisms, and finally zooms in on the period surrounding World War I. Involving extensive border changes and inducing large-scale migrations of ethnic minorities, both the war and the peace treaties triggered a wave of name changes: territories and cities were officially renamed and citizens were encouraged to express their national allegiance through changing foreign-sounding personal names into “national” ones. Writing most of Ulysses during the war and inserting most of the references to specific name changes into the text in the year following the Paris Peace Conference, 1921, Joyce’s composition history suggests a response to a very topical issue: the revision of borders and names with a view to obliterate and rewrite complex histories of migrations.