Dubliners' IOU: the aesthetics of exchange in "After the Race" and "Two Gallants".(Essay)

This essay argues that "After the Race" and "Two Gallants" narrate the psychological functions of capital in order to develop an economy of language and text. Desire is intimately tied to the objects of exchange and their contingent values. Focusing on the split nature of the commodity--as material object that refers to the immaterial form of exchange value--together with Georg Simmel's theory of exchange, the essay first shows how a psychology of loss in the stories expresses the imbalances of exchange that structure the production of surplus. It then argues that early Joycean narrative employs this contradiction of capitalist exchange by repeatedly staging the arrest of circulation and desire. Finally, this narrative tension is read as a way of redefining the relationship between epiphany and inter-textuality in the modernist textual economy of Dubliners.

Keywords: Modernism / exchange / commodity / objects in literature / loss

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After the Race" and "Two Gallants," even more than the other stories collected in Dubliners, narrate the psychological functions of the dynamics of capital in order to develop an economy of language and text. The two stories form a compendium narrative of exchange: the first concerns a hopeful, if suspect, Irish investment in a new French auto production firm, and the second dramatizes the micropolitics of the basest level of material circulation. Desire is intimately tied up with the social contingencies of values inscribed on the material objects foregrounded by the text. As such, subjectivity in both stories is continuously constituted in exchange. In particular, the characters' psychological economies are expressions of the material arrest of circulation and desire contradictorily immanent to the necessary generation of surplus.

Objects of exchange drive both of these stories according to the "material relations between persons and social relations between things" crucial to Marx's theory of the commodity fetish (Capital 84), but also serve as material indices of an economy of desire steeped in paralysis. This material economy of desire is also Joyce's economy of language and text. Both stories equate public life with exchange, and both figure the subject within a textual economy that is simultaneously restrictive and repetitive on the one hand and metonymically inter-textual on the other. This narrative aesthetic, built around the objects of exchange, foregrounds the contradictory coexistence of loss and surplus that structures, and is disavowed by, commodity capital.

I assume, with Trevor Williams, that material conditions, specifically those of a colonized Irish industry, are fundamental to Dubliners' fictional treatment of social relations and subjectivity. Like Williams, I think that Dubliners repeatedly shows that "the dominated within the colonial relationship are not only exploited but also asked to pay ... for the privilege of being exploited (Reading Joyce 62-3) and that "even the most private personal relationships are invaded by the economic dimension" (81). It is in this light that I rely on and argue with Garry Leonard's work, which stresses the psychological dimension of lack operative in Dubliners. "Instead of a self-contained character," he argues, the text "presents the matrix of contingencies that underlie the mystery of an individual's consciousness" (Reading Dubliners 22). Leonard understands this "mystery" according to a Lacanian reading of the commodity-object and desire: like the objet a in Lacan, the commodity "is not what we want, but what causes us to want" (Advertising 52). In other words, objects in "After the Race" and "Two Gallants" (all of which take the commodity form) sustain desire by not fulfilling a fundamental lack in the subject. I stress, however, that this lack must be read in terms of a split within the object itself, between its material presence and a contingent exchange value that haunts material acquisition--the coin in "Two Gallants" and Jimmy's IOUs in "After the Race" are exemplary. (1) These intersections of capitalist and psychic economies lend themselves to an early Joycean modernist narrative economy. Mark Osteen has shown how the linguistic economies of Joyce's texts reflect the contradictory capitalist impulses embodied by miser and spendthrift and the anxieties stemming from the imbalances of capitalist exchange. (2) And while I rely on Osteen's argument that the "verbal economy [of Dubliners] reflects an awareness of scarcity," and the "condensed style mirrors the financial and emotional poverty of Dublin's citizens" (Economy 19), I also argue that in staging the conflicting moments of expenditure and gain through repeated narrative arrest, the stories develop an economy of text as an aesthetic gain constituted in the loss and imbalances that drive capitalist exchange.

Joyce's psychological and narrative economy of exchange has a strong epistemological kinship with Georg Simmel's sociology of exchange, and Simmel's model offers a productive way to synthesize the economic and psychological--or materialist and phenomenological--poles of much recent Joyce criticism. For Simmel, surplus is generated by the mutual sacrifices of individuals engaged in exchange. Value accrues to the object via a psychic energy that moves between the subjects of exchange across that mediating object. Surplus is generated when each subject actually gives more than he or she possesses, making the object's economic or exchange value a product of shifting individual feeling: