'A competent keyless citizen': Complex agency in James Joyce's 'Ulysses', Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man', and Philip Roth's 'Operation Shylock'

This project examines complex agency in James Joyce's Ulysses, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock. I derive the term complex agency from complexity theory in the sciences, which describes how self-adjusting systems behave when perched on the edge between order and chaos. In literary terms, complex agency represents the engagement of history and tradition against possibility and improvisation in the activity of personhood in the world. I argue that this engagement of order and chaos becomes the source for meaningful selfhood for the protagonists of my texts, explicitly in Invisible Man and Operation Shylock, implicitly in Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, Invisible Man, and Philip Roth all can be described as Bloom describes himself: they are "competent keyless citizen (s) " (U 17.1019), that is, actors in the world whose actions are meaningful, neither determined by outside forces nor disappearing into the vagaries of discourse, yet always local and provisional, not absolute. They participate in their world with some success but without complete control over that world or even themselves. In short, I argue that in a radical modernist work like Ulysses, a modern American classic like Invisible Man, and a postmodern work like Operation Shylock, the concept of human subjectivity is still very much alive, despite what contemporary literary theory says to the contrary: the protagonists of all these texts seek to engage the orderly foundations with the chaotic possibilities of their lives to achieve a meaningful agency in the world.