Psychogeography in Ulysses

2007

The objective of this thesis is to look at Joyce's novel Ulysses from the perspective of Schopenhauer and Freud, to see what they have to offer to a reading of the novel. Chapter

Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2002

[A]theists […] go howling for the priest and they dying and why […] because they’re afraid of hell […] I know. So says Molly Bloom in her eight sentence soliloquy in the closing chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses and in doing so engages our evolved cognitive facility to monitor sources of representation (to keep track of who knows that the terror of hell is known in the mind of another), that is, to metarepresent them. The ability to imagine the thoughts spiral through the mind of another is known to cognitive psychologists as ‘mind-reading’ or ‘Theory of Mind’. This enables us to endow literary characters with a range of emotions, thoughts, desires and, due to our metarepresentational ability, assign each degrees of validity according to the source of the representation (i.e the characters and the narrator). Keeping up with levels of intentionality, to give it its critical gloss, in order to rake a text for clues as to the mental states of its characters becomes more problematic for the reader who has to contend with the complexities of a text such as Ulysses. But as Lisa Zunshine has noted, we are able to attribute mental states to fictional characters because our ability to do so is ‘crucially mediated by the workings of our metarepresentational ability’. This paper will discuss the dizzying multi-representations of Joyce’s fictional phallogocentric world of turn-of-the-century Dublin as mediated through the thoughts of his ruminative androgyne Leopold Bloom who the author sets in perfect textual relief to the more literary Stephen Dedalus. Unlike Stephen, who increasingly shuns the beery bravado of the masculine world and retreats into a wandering silence, Bloom displays a rare capacity to ‘see’ Dublin’s socio-cultural ideologies through the eyes and minds of its atomized population. He has, in effect, the ability to markedly influence the reader’s interpretation of each character that weaves its faltering way through Joyce’s vertiginous textual tapestry. I hope to demonstrate that, even though Bloom ‘exists’ only as black marks on a white page, an entity composed entirely of syntax, our evolved mammalian brains are able to emotionally invest in, as well as assign a weighty degree of ‘truth-value’ to the introspective contemplations of the author’s ink-and-paper mind-reader, Leopold Bloom.

James Joyce's Ulysses has been celebrated around the world by individuals who despite their diverse backgrounds, are all bounded by the living experience: a shared circumstance that enables them to relate to the novel's plot and, appreciate its unconventional style, as well as indulge in its idiosyncrasies. Ulysses has been a controversy since 1922 when it was first published, and this can be attributed to the divergence from grand narratives whilst adopting a framework that is not familiar to the average reader. The novel in its entirety offers readers an intimate experience with themselves, unlike conventional narratives which demarcates the characters' experience from the readers', as distance is established to distinguish the realms of fiction and reality. What Joyce offers in Ulysses is so much more, by applying so little. This does not at all translate to the oversimplification of the novel's aesthetics. Instead, it attempts to demonstrate the possibilities of depth from what is seemingly facile. The paradox encompasses the complexities of the living experience through the manifestation of prosaic day-to-day concerns when being metaphysically investigated. It is in this aspect that Ulysses attempts at proposing not so much as a definite conclusion to ontological and epistemological enquiries, but more of a closure, or perhaps drawing the perimeters of the living experience that have been the focus of many philosophical dialectics.

This thesis examines the role of the five senses in James Joyce’s Ulysses, focusing particularly on the contrast between Leopold Bloom and the Dubliners. While the Dubliners misuse their senses and indulge too much in the sensual life, Mr. Bloom does not rely only on his sensorial perceptions to explore the reality surrounding him, but constantly meditates on his senses to extract a deeper understanding of the world, moving beyond the visible and tangible in search of meaning. In Ulysses it is possible to recognise that there are certain episodes in which one of the senses dominates over the others, not absolutely, but sufficiently enough to establish a distinct connection between this sense and the events taking place. In these episodes Joyce presents a sensorial critique on Dublin’s culture and, by contrasting the Dubliners with Bloom, makes it possible to identify the causes for Dublin’s paralysis, in the annihilation of the intellect in favour of the sensual life. After a brief introduction of Joyce’s historical and cultural heritage regarding the senses, each of the following chapters will concentrate on one sense and the corresponding episode, starting from the less educated senses (smell and taste) and ending with the most sophisticated (Hearing and sight). An exception is made for the sense of touch, which does not include a critique on the Dubliners. Bloom, who has a problem with intimacy, prefers to delegate the ability to use this sense to his wife, Molly, a woman who feels confident with her body and whom represents the most natural approach to touch.

Our evolved mammalian brain has developed the ability to use somatic 'cues' to interpret an assumed interior emotional state, known in cognitive psychology circles as 'mind-reading' or 'Theory of Mind'. In conjunction with the Theory of Mind, this paper will explore the concept of Metarepresentation, that is the brain's ability to keep track of who said what to whom and sometimes where or when it was said and for what purpose. Our mind-reading and metarepresentational abilities enable us to find an albeit rather halting path through Joyce's labyrinthine novel, even if we have to gingerly retrace our steps a frightening number of times en route to the heart of

Katalin Kálay (ed.), The Arts of Attention, Budapest, L’Harmattan, 2016, pp. 89-99.

Few works in literary history have earned as much attention as James Joyce’s Ulysses. How do we explain this? There is of course the novel’s inherent textual quality. Joycean text requests uncommon readerly attention for even the most basic operations of narrative understanding. If immanent analysis reveals high intra- and intertextual complexity, another question is: how comes we care so much? Why does this novel call for a virtually unlimited number of referential assertions, and more importantly, why do critics so eagerly obey this call? This paper argues that Ulysses’s massive success on the market of literary attention is grounded in two separable but intrinsically linked layers of creation: paratextual and textual technique, the former framing our reception of the latter. It characterizes Ulysses as its authors conscious attempt to produce an ultimate work of hermeneutic surplus, a text virtually limitless and yet entirely meaningful. Attention management is the crucial element of such a production.

2016

During the 1920s, James Joyce remarked that classical writers "show you a pleasant exterior but ignore the inner construction, the pathological and psychological body which our behaviour and thought depend on. Comprehension is the purpose of literature, but how can we know human beings if we continue to ignore their most vital functions?" 1 This thesis responds to Joyce's endeavour, using a theoretical framework derived from recent research in cognitive science to analyse human action and interaction as portrayed by literary character in Ulysses. Accordingly, it is interested in the narrative devices Joyce uses to realistically construct his protagonist Leopold Bloom. It questions how cognitive science can further illuminate, respond to, and rearticulate both how and why these devices work as they do.

Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2009

Highlighting in its very title the unlimited dimensions of intertextuality, James Joyce"s Ulysses selfconsciously establishes itself as a text that seems impossible to translate without losing essential elements. Ulysses, (in)famous for its multiple styles that in themselves seem to give shape and content to the various themes at hand, is a text for which the term "intertextuality" seems to fall short. With a particular eye for the problems that occur when translating intertextual elements of Ulysses into Dutch and other languages and following Fritz Senn"s coinage of the term "interdynamism", this article sets out to investigate a handful of examples from Ulysses that pinpoint the problematic nature of the various echoes and allusions in it.