The Potentiality of Paralysis in Joyce’s “Counterparts”

Abstract

The scrivener presents a curious case—writing the law and bringing it into existence via the material reproduction of legal instruments. Our most famous literary example is Melville's Bartleby, forever immortalized by his listless refusal: "I'd prefer not to." Yet near on fifty years after Melville, Joyce conceived another scrivener, neglected by comparison: Farrington from the Dubliners story, "Counterparts." Though critics have noted how Farrington is shot through with the "hemiplegia or paralysis" Joyce claimed lay in the soul of Dublin, few have considered paralysis as a concept containing the opposite—a catatonic moment of potential, rendered aesthetic by Joyce's story. Drawing on Agamben's conception of potentiality, this paper takes Joyce's scrivener beyond the realist critique of the ennui of the imperial subject to explore how Farrington reveals a double potential: the potential of the paralyzed colonial subject; and the potential of thinking with contemporary critical theory to see paralysis not as an end, foreclosure, or stasis, but an aesthetic rendering of contingency.