Abstract

The novel Ulysses shows not only that nationalism fails to envision what a nation actually looks like but also that any democratic vision of literature itself cannot, by definition, be contained within one form. If the current rise of the Alt-Right and Donald Trump suggests a trend toward what Zygmunt Bauman posthumously terms “retrotopia,” or a retreat from the global into the intensely local, tribal, and even fetal, then a renewed assessment of Joyce via Gilles Deleuze shows the broad failure of a variety of nationalist discourses in addressing who or what actually makes a nation or, in the words of Trump himself, “makes a nation great.” Oppressive retreats into tribalism do not make a nation “great” or even constitute a nation period; they only fail to account for the citizens that make up that very nation. In short, a retreat from diversity and difference is a failure of imagining the human condition, an imagining only aided by literature and critical theory as egalitarian as Joyce’s and Deleuze’s.