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Ontotropology: Disfiguration and Unreadability in James Joyce's Ulysses
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Ontotropology: Disfiguration and Unreadability in James Joyce's Ulysses
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Journal Article
Ontotropology: Disfiguration and Unreadability in James Joyce's Ulysses
2011
Overview
This paper explores how figures of temporality, disfiguration and orgasm in the 'Nausicaa' episode of Joyce's
Ulysses
come together to allegorise unreadability. I argue that the text's invocation of a '
contretemps
' to figure a scene of indigestion elicits a temporality of shock, producing a counternarrative that thwarts (vomits up) the ostensible readability it purports. Moreover, the principles of ideality and transparency commonly associated with the sentimental mode are countervailed by the episode's transgressive rhetorical shocks: a public display of onanistic activity and the revelation of Gerty's 'lame leg'. The text's renderings of Gerty's disfiguration as well as the orgasmic both work to allegorise unreadability; I also suggest that they ramify ontologically. Drawing on Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, I investigate the co-articulation of ontology and tropology in 'Nausicaa' to adumbrate a theory of 'ontotropology' - the figuration of ontology as an undecidable condition of tropological surfeit born out of temporal disjunction.
