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.