“THAT BANTRY JOBBER:” WILLIAM MARTIN MURPHY AND THE CRITIQUE OF PROGRESS AND PRODUCTIVITY IN ULYSSES

Though only mentioned by name in "Cyclops," Irish entrepreneur William Martin Murphy haunts Ulysses through the ubiquitous presence of his two most profitable enterprises: Dublin United Tramways Corporation and The Irish Independent, I contend that his presence - pervasive, but always once removed-^constitutes another of Joyce's salvos against the structure of Irish social and economic realities.1 When coupled with the Citizen's referring to him as "Martin Murphy, that Bantry jobber" (U 12.236), the connection Joyce draws between Murphy's financial interests becomes clear: the representation of the Dublin United Tramways corporation and The Irish Independent marks both endeavors as exploitive of what Fredric Jameson refers to as "the colonized space" of Irish modernity.2 For Jameson, occupied Dublin functions as a "colonized space" because, as inhabitants of "a national situation which reproduces the appearance of First World social reality and social relationships ... but whose underlying structure is in fact much closer to that of the Third World or of colonized daily life," Dubliners live and work under the strictures of a compromised and colonized self-consciousness. This reflexivity is as integral to their construction as colonial subjects as the creation of a stable and stabilizing symbolic order is to the construction of their imperial counterparts.3 Ulysses maps the social reality of Dublin because - unlike an imperial subject, who is limited by "a systematic block on any adequate consciousness of the structure of the imperial system" (Jameson, 50) - Joyce's self-consciousness affords him a limited objective perspective from which to make an accurate survey of colonized Ireland. Despite its shortcomings, Jameson's argument affords critics a perspective from which authorial intent can be countenanced without necessarily being sanctioned in any way, shape, or form by a particular author. Joyce need not have even known of William Martin Murphy's existence to engage in a critique of the capitalist as an imperial abstraction, because colonized space determines the responses of all colonial subjects, such that any informed statements about social reality contain critiques of imperialism - and, contra Lukacs, Ulysses is arguably the most informed a statement about social reality m fin de siecle Dublin that exists. In fact, Joyce did know of Murphy's existence; however, this does not prevent him from also critiquing Murphy as an imperial abstraction. My argument follows both potential arguments, demonstrating how the Citizen's critique of Murphy the man extends to both a critique of Murphy the imperial abstraction, or the sum total of his holdings in the colonial economy; and to the economic and political power he actively wielded in Dublin, which is represented throughout Ulysses by the tramcars and printing presses that sustained it.In "Machines, Empire, and the Wise Virgins,"4 Patrick McGee describes how the tramcars in the opening sequence of "Aeolus" move "as if there were no human beings attached to them, as if .... [h]uman operators have become functions of the machines they operate". Murphy's spectral presence in Ulysses is the product of the same logic: he is no more representable as a human being than the unskilled laborers who operate his machines. Despite the obvious class distinctions between the workers represented in the "Aeolus" and Murphy, a wealthy capitalist, the latter's presence in the text is as much a function of the machines he owns as the former's are of those they operate. Ulysses demystifies this imperial ideology of progress and productivity through a series of allusions to the Lockout of 1913, condemning Murphy's earnest nationalist endeavors as unintentional corollaries of his exploitation of the common Irish laborer. By interweaving references to Murphy's tramcars and newspapers with images of the Irish flâneur, Joyce offers a critique of the imperial project by means of its ironic, unintended results: the Irish flâneur signifies the suppression of an alternative (and unprofitable) order of transportation. …