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The Decomposing Form of Joyce's Ulysses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Henry Staten
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Abstract

Every aspect of organic life, including sexuality and death, is comprehended in Ulysses as a moment or aspect of a general circulation whose primary figure is eating and the digestive process. But the digestive process is a form of decomposition, and in one sense Ulysses is a stomach or tomb in which language breaks down into its constituent units—ultimately, letters, the elements of an onomatopoeic notation for human speech. Ulysses works between the figure of onomatopoeia (as the limit of mimesis) and that of infidelity (as an image for the undermining of all ontological security at the sexual-gastronomic level) to reconceive mimesis as the isomorphism between two decompositional series, one involving language and the other the body.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 112 , Issue 3 , May 1997 , pp. 380 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1997

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