The Narrative of Ulysses
Chronos, Kairos and the Waning of Affect
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2025.54045Keywords:
Ulysses, narrative, cronos, kairosAbstract
Frank Kermode’s proposal for understanding narrative structure in terms of a double temporality, the first to be understood as a chronology of passing time (cronos), the second as disruption of the temporal flux that suggests a time of extraordinary revelation (kairos), opens the way to a reading of Ulysses in a manner that is more spatial than temporal. It is a reading characterized by the spatial dispersion of meaning to be restructured by a reader committed more to reassembling pieces of a puzzle than to an ordinary reading. In such an alternative form of reading, typical epiphanies of the early works by Joyce, displayed as the emotional force of kairos, tend to wear away or even disappear. This loss of power of kairetic force, understood by Kermode as endowed with existential meaning, can be productively understood in terms of Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “waning of affect” in postmodernity.
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