The semiotics of "Transit" in Joyce's Ulysses

• Published in: Neohelicon (Budapest) 2009-06, Vol.36 (1), p.153
• Main Author: Etienne Barnett, R -l
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analogy (Language change); British & Irish literature; English literature; Irish literature; Joyce, James (1882-1941); Literary criticism; Otherness; Semiotics
• ISSN: 0324-4652; 1588-2810
• DOI: 10.1007/s11059-009-1015-z

An analogous combination of accumulating change and persisting habit is superbly formulated in Alfred North Whitehead's account of process or becoming: "There is the aspect of permanence in which a given type of attainment is endlessly repeated for its own sake; and there is the aspect of transition to other things..." Alternatively formulated, to interpolate additional phrases from Whitehead, "transference" and "passage" (ergo, metempsychosis) for Stephen and Bloom concern an unfolding process, one which entails both conservation and novelty -- both "inheritance of aspects from their own past" and "continuous transition" to the future. And it is such that, though, in the Joycean schema, "vital growth" is indeed continuous "from infancy through maturity to decay" (817), it nevertheless entails convulsive transitional phases ("convulsions of metamorphosis"), involving psychologically turbulent oppositions between that which was and that which is coming to be. Bloomsday -- June 16, 1904 -- concerns precisely such transitional phases. All is subjected to the aura of endless modification and reification, all entrapped within a world of oft haunting refrain, a universe wherein re-inscription overtakes otherness, wherein renewal subsumes defeat: whence, ultimately, Ulysses is, as a literary construct, a scrupulously coordinated writ on the ludic contortions of difference and sameness. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]