Reading Ulysses as a Journal Kiheon Nam (Seoul National University of Science and Technology) Joyce's setting of the clock of Ulysses on June, 16, 1904, has raised a lot of suspicion about his lack of history and surmises about any special significance of that day. Of the two different perspectives on history, the “historiographical” is preferred in this approach to Ulysses, since the “historicist” valorizes grand narratives of historic significance, which means the exclusion of petit récits. By adopting a journal form, Joyce strategically blurs the complacent distinctions between private and public, history and journal. Many critics have attempted to contextualize the date, June 16, 1904, but no plausible, satisfying answer has ever been given. I argue that this dissatisfaction must be readdressed in terms of Joyce's interest in journalism and popular culture. Long before the “Aeolus” episode, whose location is the newspaper office, and whose page format is similar to newspapers, Joyce has employed a personal journal at the end of A Portrait. The itemization of experience is similar to interior monologue technique, in that it adopts the Bergsonian concept of durée, a psychological concept of time. So Joyce's organizing of Ulysses as a journal is a strategy to incorporate encyclopedic desire into a limited form. As a result, many anachronic references were pointed out by many critics, some of whom blame Joyce's Ulysses for being an ahistoric, apolitical text. But Joyce questions the linearity of historical narrative by deploying many historical events in a fragmented, synchronic way. Joyce must have used some anachronic references to the effect that the complacent juxtaposition between unrelated, conflicting discourses is questioned. Joyce's use of a journal form articulates his preoccupation with history. In “Nestor,” Stephen's retort to Mr. Deasy's remark of teleological historicism encapsulates Joyce's critique of the unilinear, monocausal concept of historical progressism. Joyce's yoked condensation of many concepts of time - diachronic, synchronic, transchronic, etc. - blurs our sense of history as telos, like Mr. Deasy's goal. Instead, Joyce embraces the trivial events, fragments of history in a journal, thus incessantly interrogating the history as the victor's recordings. Joyce must have resisted the justification of the British domination over Ireland as a historical “fact.”
키워드
James JoyceUlyssesjournalismanachronismtime-culthistorypopular culture
저자
Kiheon Nam [ Seoul National University of Science and Technology ]
국제언어인문학회 [INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR HUMANISTIC STUDIES IN LANGUAGE]
설립연도
2000
분야
인문학>언어학
소개
국제언어인문학회는 '언어를 통한 인문학 연구'의 필요성에 동감하는 여러 전공분야 학자들의 뜻을 담고 있습니다. 언어에 초점을 맞추는 것은, 다양한 전공분야의 참여에서 생겨날 수 있는 '이질적 집합'의 상황을 극복하기 위한 장치입니다. 현재로서는 작은 불씨를 지핀 것에 불과합니다. 그러나 이렇게 일구어진 불꽃이 새로운 학풍의 바람결에 커다란 섬광으로 빛나게 될 날이 올 것을 우리는 확신합니다. 우리의 학회와 학술지는 인문학 불변의 가치와 시대적 사명을 인식하는 국내외의 학자들을 향해 활짝 개방되어 있습니다. 특정 전공의 범위를 넘어서서 철학, 문학, 언어학, 종교, 역사, 문화, 예술 등의 시각에서 언어의 본질을 토론할 기회가 될 것입니다.