Humanities (Jul 2017)
Joyce’s “Force” and His Tuskers as Modern Animals
Abstract
Focusing on those animals that have been overlooked in reading Joyce’s work opens up new perspectives for understanding his writing. One of his earliest essays, “Force” (1898), written at the age of sixteen, shows his so far unexplored concern about the domestication of animals and extinction of species, and develops a theory of subjugation. The essay provides a useful mainstay for considering the “tuskers,” (the mammoth and mastodon, the elephants, their tusks, and ivory) in the context of the cultural discourses of modern society. The game-changer discovery of the notion of extinction; representation of mammoths and mastodons as fearful creatures; the novelty of elephants exposed to curious gaze on exhibition; the sculpture of Elvery’s Elephant House in Sackville street; a circus elephant and “terrible queer creature” episode in Stephen Hero; the forced labor perpetrated in the Congo Free State to exploit rubber and the ivory of wild elephants. These seemingly disparate topics deeply wedded to modernity will be interrelated with each other in “Force,” shaping a constellation of “Joyce’s tuskers.”
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