The counternarratives of <i>Ulysses</i>

Abstract James Joyce’s Ulysses contains numerous counternarratives – ideological, cultural, and literary – and it brilliantly embodies those oppositions in the construction of the narrative itself. Ulysses enacts counternarratives of the traditional heroic epic, the Victorian novel, and mimetic narrative in general. Joyce removes all supernatural and implausible elements in his version of the epic form, thereby deflating its pretension and at the same time making it more realistic. His primary assault on Victorian conventions comes through representations of the human body that had been forbidden by Victorian statutes and sensibilities. Instead, Joyce creates an epic of the human body in Ulysses , representing all human bodily functions, including urinating, defecating, menstruating, masturbating, and nose-picking. Most egregiously, Joyce assaults the mimetic or realistic parameters of fiction in several ways: having perfected realistic representations of subvocal speech, he goes on to present impossible scenarios, as when one character remembers something perceived only by another. His intersecting counter narratives together reveal how much had been denied, ignored, or repressed by earlier forms of fictional representation, and thereby disclose the range, importance, and the power of counternarratives, which in turn can help us theorize them more effectively.