James Joyce’s work plays a crucial role in defining what modernism is, so his
stylistic experiment has been a focus to scholars and readers. But his interest in
technological innovation presents another approach to the definition of modernism.
Joyce deploys many innovative devices, all of which did not contribute to the
progress of science. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is obsessed with troublesome
constipation and its resulting piles, when he is reminded of the innovative device,
the Wonder Worker, the pamphlet of which is shown to be kept in his desk
drawers. Although Molly points to the male anxiety about virility by thinking of
this device, the significance is increasing when it is referred to in Finnegans Wake.
By associating the Wellington monument with the Wonder Worker, Joyce invokes
the relationship between war ideology and phallic power. Joyce’s doubling
technique is employed to associate Duke Wellington with Marquess of Willingdone,
who as appointed as the Crown Governor of Bombay. The latter’s imperial policy
triggered Gandhi’s hunger strike. Joyce continues to present a scandal of adultery
between Duke Wellington and Harriette Wilson, thus emaciating his virility, since
her biography exposed the weakness of the Duke’s sexual power. By referring to
the television as “the charge of a light barricade,
” Joyce invokes one of the most
notorious battles, the Charge of the Light Brigade, in which 600 cavalry men were
killed under the attack of cannons in the Crimean War. Joyce witnessed the climax
of technological progress in the First World War, which made mass destruction of
human beings possible.