James Joyce Quarterly

Abstract:

Joyce’s treatment of animals in Ulysses goes from anthropomorphism to human animality and debasement. The characters’ earlier encounters with animals are characterized by the projection of human thoughts and feelings onto them or the attribution of human qualities, which culminate in the actual/visionary metamorphosis of a beagle into the body of the deceased Paddy Dignam in “Circe.” Moreover, it is precisely in the Nighttown episode that we witness the degrading animalization of Lipoti and Rudolph Virag, while Bloom, whose body features various animal appendages that often turn him into a hybrid creature, undergoes several beastlike transformations. The presence of talking or anthropomorphic animals, mainly linked to an oneiric dimension, looks back to a medieval and humanistic tradition exploring the paradigm of separation of species. This essay suggests that the blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman animals in Ulysses may have been inspired by Miguel de Cervantes, whose novella The Dialogue of the Dogs is listed as part (actually in an Italian translation titled Il dialogo dei cani) of Joyce’s Trieste library. In this tale, beasts are attributed distinctive human qualities, speech first and foremost, thus subverting traditional hierarchies. Exactly as in Ulysses, moreover, animals are “elevated” to the level of humans in the same way as humans are “degraded” to the level of animals. In other words, different orders of bodies may fuse together in the absence of any ontological standard by which to enforce their hierarchical separation.