MDDM18: Prolegomena

[Dave Monroe]

>From Leo Bersani, "Against Ulysses," The Culture of
Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990 [New York:
toExcel, 2000]), pp. 155-78 ...

   "Ulysses substitutes for the interpretive ordeals
posed by such writers as Lawrence, Mallarme, and
Bataille a kind of affectless busyness, the
comfortable if heavy work of finding all the
connections in the light of which the novel can be
made intelligible but not interpreted....  The
intertextual criticism invited by Ulysses is the
domestication of literature, a technique for making
familiar the potentially traumatic seductions of
reading.  Even more: Ulysses eliminates reading as the
ground of interpretation; or, to put this in other
terms, it invites intertextual elucidations as a
strategy to prohibit textual interpretations.  In much
contemporary criticism, reading no longer provides a
hermeneutical ground of interpretive constraint.  This
is not to say that there should be or ever was one
legitimate interpretation of each text, but rather
that ... texts are made intelligible only by the
intra-and intertextual clues they drop.  Ulysses is a
text to be deciphered but not read....  The exegetical
work to be done is enormous, but it has already been
done by the author and we simply have to catch up with
him
   "If criticism always rewrites the texts to which it
is somewhat deceptively adheres, Joyce minimizes the
losses inevitably incurred by literature in its
critical appropriation by directing the appropriating
process....  Ulysses allows for no such laxity ... the
Joycean text escapes from the reader's dangerous
freedom merely by insisting that it be read with an
excruciatingly close attention and a nearly superhuman
memory.  It asks that we be nothing but the exegetical
machine necessary to complete its sense.  Ulysses is
constantly proposing homework, work we can do outside
the text ... and in thus insisting on how much it
needs us, it also paradoxically saves itself from
us.... it insists on an uninterrupted attention not
exactly to itself but to its instructions for its own
further elaboration.  Ulysses promises a critical
utopia: the final elucidation of its sense, the day
when all connections will have been discovered and
collected in a critical Book that would objectively
repeat Ulysses ...." (pp. 174-5)

   "Intertextual criticism is the practical activity
that testifies to our espousal of a cultural ethos of
the redemptive authority and mastery of art; it is, in
the case of Ulysses, the imitatio that allows us to
join Joyce in a community built on identifications and
recognitions...." (p. 178)

And whilst y'all are pondering that ...



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