The Money Question at the Back of Everything: Clichés, Counterfeits and Forgeries in Joyce's "Eumaeus"

TLDR: The "Eumaeus" episode of Joyce's Ulysses marks the beginning of the Nostos, or return to origins as discussed by the authors, where the reader, after the dizzying transformations of "Circe," begins the sixteenth episode with some relief: we seem to have returned to recognizable novelistic prose and to a homely world of sandstrewers, brooms and cups of coffee.

Abstract: The "Eumaeus" episode of Joyce's Ulysses marks the beginning of the Nostos, or return to origins. Likewise the reader, after the dizzying transformations of "Circe," begins the sixteenth episode with some relief: we seem to have returned to recognizable novelistic prose and to a homely world of sandstrewers, brooms and cups of coffee. Along with this apparent realism the narrative is also imbued with the economic ideology of realism—a bourgeois economism in which all objects carry price tags (Vernon 67). Indeed, the narrator foregrounds economics as both form and intent, finding "the money question ... at the back of everything" (.1114) in a dual sense: habitually employing economic terms to explain behavior, the teller also relies (perhaps unwittingly) upon homologies between money and narration in hopes of discovering a stable economy of meaning.1 The reassurances these homologies promise soon dissolve for, beneath the appearance of realism, beneath the narrator's bourgeois ideology and entrepreneurial plans, a counternarrative emerges that challenges conventional economies of meaning, subverts stable identity and undermines the belief that money explains and stabilizes value. As part of the Nostos, "Eumaeus" is also much concerned with origins and originality. In this regard, too, the very homologies that seem to reassure actually problematize the relationships among origins, value and authenticity: here money and narratives are counterfeit; identities are