Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In James Joyce’s ULYSSES, published in 1922 but set on16th of June 1904, instead of sex outside of marriage signaling divorce, we have its opposite: equanimity. As character-narrator, Bloom resists the trappings of the cuckold narrative and performs what Eve Sedgwick might call a reparative reading on the über text that is the marriage plot: he vanquishes Molly’s suitor through a non-action action. This reading of ULYSSES removes, at last, the paranoid from the marriage contract. Sedgwick, writing about Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, argues that ideological thinking has become “mandated for inclusion” in our critical studies; then asks: what if we removed “the paranoid” from our own critical readings of texts? My dissertation focus on ULYSSES has been on how Bloom (aka Odysseus) performs a queering of the historical duel by using narrative prowess, rather than violence, to exile Blazes Boylan from the novel. This counter-mapping requires its own critical latency; one that draws the unseen but seen elements of narrative practice to the forefront of our thinking without placing them in a space of proving. Critical latency as an approach to the analysis of texts fixes determinations in the mind without them being fixed. As Beckett taught us when he said, “Je ne sais pas qui est Godot,” interpretations of the new modernist works might most effectively not aim to solve a text. After a hundred years of machinations of critical theory—an endless series of constructs for how to read—we are, in some ways, still waiting.