Instead of the Chattering Narrator, the Chattering Criticism
on the Dialectic of Explanation in James Joyce’s Ulysses
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2025.55138Keywords:
Ulysses, commentary, interpretationAbstract
This article starts by presenting and discussing narrative discontinuities that characterize the first part of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Intimately related to the stream of consciousness technique and the resulting psychological verisimilitude, style is here constituted by holes, gaps or fissures in the narrative material. The narrator at work here contrasts sharply with that of XIX century realism, who, by explaining everything, we argue, chattered. The main claim of the article is that a significant part of Ulysses criticism, by trying to fill out such holes, gaps or fissures, reinstates this blabbering narrator through the form of commentary, almost a genre on its own. As a result, a dialectics of elucidation takes shapes: clarifying, explicating, decoding etc. are productive when they are at the service of interpretation; in the lack thereof, they are nothing but agents for the work’s accrual of symbolic capital, a Ulysses now totally surrendered to the culture industry.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Camila Hespanhol Peruchi, Fabio Akcelrud Durão (Autor)

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