Structuralist and Poststructuralist Joyce: “He War” to Differences!

Abstract The article explores the complementary relationship between structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . It does so in two ways: firstly, it traces this interpretive tension through early critical responses, particularly T. S. Eliot’s mythic structuralism and Ezra Pound’s proto-deconstructive reading of Homeric parallels as mere “scaffolding”. Secondly, the study offers a close reading of the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses and of one of the most anti-representational works, the “Mamafesta” section of Finnegans Wake . Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of “chaosmos” and Roland Barthes’ shift from excavating structures to constructing interpretive systems, the article argues that Joyce’s work simultaneously absorbs and subverts both structural meaning and anti-representational practice. His textual mechanisms operate through excessive language and systematisation, parodying taxonomic discourse and catalogue-making in ways that at once enact and destabilise the drive toward comprehensive representation. These texts, written decades before the formal emergence of structuralism, anticipate both its theoretical frameworks and the poststructuralist critiques that would follow, particularly the decentering of fixed meaning and the generative instability of signification.