The polysystem and the postcolonial: The wondrous adventures of James Joyce and his Ulysses across book markets

Abstract

The allegedly obscene content of Joyce's Ulysses caused the book to be censored for over a decade in the Anglo-American world. Today, however, Ulysses is considered a “classic”, making one wonder what promoted it from the periphery to the centre of polysystems worldwide. This article uses the figure of James Joyce and the success of his Ulysses to explore issues of marginality/centrality in the postcolonial sense and in the interpretation provided by polysystem theory, integrated here with Appadurai's notion of scapes. It begins by addressing the notions of “the classic”, “the canon” and “centrality” within a polysystem. It then discusses the role of institutions and translators in placing Ulysses and its author at the centre of the Irish and Italian polysystems in particular, and finally probes into the role of (re)translation in protecting the postcolonially subversive potential of the novel from the risk of becoming mainstream once it becomes central in a polysystem.

Keywords:

• James Joyce
• Giulio de Angelis
• Ulysses
• postcolonial studies
• polysystem theory
• scapes

Notes

1. See Said (1978) and Sardar (1999) for a discussion of Orientalism, and Lennon (2004) for a parallel between the colonial representations of the Orient and those of Celtic Ireland. See Attridge and Howes (2000) for an in-depth analysis of the links between Joyce and Ireland's colonial situation at his time.

2. All historical data come from the Italian national archive of libraries (Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche, n.d.). The research was carried out on 23 April 2011 on the now dismantled site http://www.internetculturale.it/moduli/opac/opac.jsp. The publication date of Ulisse in the Capolavori della Medusa series was taken from book traders’ websites such as http://www.malombra.it/ and http://www.abebooks.it/ (both visited on 29 October 2011).

3. This information was taken from the reprint list on the copyright page of the latest edition available at a local bookshop at the time of writing, dated June 2011.

4. The degree to which a product will be consumed more or less directly or completely will depend on the context. A willing and well-disposed consumer with the required resources (money or an accessible library) could read an institutionally well-promoted product from start to end, while at school a “staple” may be consumed in the form of “class reading/discussion of selected passage(s)”.

5. The figure was obtained from the website of the Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche by manually counting and double-checking the hits for “author=James Joyce” and “title=Ulisse”, excluding entries for audiobooks, reading companions, copies of Bona Flecchia's translation, and other non-Italian translations.

6. Il nome della rosa was published 20 years after Ulisse but has the advantage of being native to the Italian literary polysystem, in addition to being one of Italy's main literary exports, with all the implications that this status can have for the centrality of the work in the polysystem. Data for Il nome della rosa were retrieved through a search of “author=Umberto Eco” and “title=nome della rosa”, excluding translations, the postface published as a separate volume, and essays written on the novel.

7. The reading companion that is sold together with the current edition of the book, for instance, was compiled by the translator himself and has not been revised since. It refers, for example, to potential “obscurities” generated by Joyce's language use and extra-textual allusions rather than De Angelis's own use of Italian, which was perfectly up to date at the time.