Title: ‘ERR’MENEUTIC OF THE “WORD†AND THE “WORLDâ€: CATEGORIZING/INTERPRETING ERRORS IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES
Abstract: The errors in/of Ulysses are of a transgressively innovative high-modernist text which unsettles notions of correctness. This essay explores a hermeneutic that circles round the ‘sanctioned’ errors of Ulysses by examining their types and implications with reference to: i) the assumptions about fiction traversed by the errors, which are at the root of the tacit norms; and ii) the interpretive dynamics demanded by the text. The problems of interpretation partly stem from the generic ambiguity of the text. The text first foregrounds and then redefines the norm for each category of error (discrepancy between real and fictional worlds, internal inconsistency, disowned errors, and so on), and accommodates the errors based on the principles of compensation and fecundity. Joycean errancy manifests a hermeneutic self-consciousness. The errors dramatize both the text’s compositional modes and its anticipative engagement with the reader. They encourage readers to bring in their paradigms of pre-understanding, but compel them to revise the paradigms till they succumb to the alternative logic of the text, with its fleeting grounds of truth, propriety, and order. The variable distance between the arranger and the erring characters/voices is a potent device for the production of meaning. Joyce can afford to compromise normative perfection because he has structured Ulysses in such a way as to provide an alternative validity for its innate deviance. In the elaborate network of correspondences and motifs, errant elements have the potential to coalesce with other elements, which can validate them under a meaning-proliferating logic. This logic hinges on an exchange of effects between textual levels (thematic, narrative, etc.).Â
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-07-28
Language: en
Type: article
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