James Joyce and the 'strolling mort': significations of death in Ulysses. (2nd January 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: George, Jibu Mathew
• Is Part Of: Mortality. Volume 22:Number 1(2017)
• Page Start: 60
• Page End: 74
• Publication Date: 2017-01-02
• Subjects: Strolling mort -- polyphony -- death-cult -- carnivalesque -- appropriation -- cultural palimpsest; Thanatology -- Periodicals; Mortality -- Periodicals; Bereavement -- Periodicals; Undertakers and undertaking -- Periodicals; 304.64
• DOI: 10.1080/13576275.2016.1204276
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1357-6275

Abstract

Abstract: Death occupies a pertinent place in the matrix of James Joyce's complex philosophical outlook, his historical engagement, social praxis, and his artistic choices. This essay shows how his high-modernist magnum opus Ulysses deconstructs and undercuts in a carnivalesque fashion the powerful religio-political appropriations of death, particularly in the Irish context of violent nationalism, and the death-cult surrounding the martyr associated with it. The subversive, heterodox perspectives on death presented in the book relieve the phenomenon of manipulative-conspiratorial meanings as well as religio-metaphysical conceptions, and regain its ordinariness. Further, operating in the precarious space between the existential and the cultural, Joyce jealously salvages the experiential dimension of mortality for reflection. The essay also argues that Joyce's 'polyphonic' discourse (theorised by Mikhail Bakhtin) of death, paradoxically, suggests an inverse critique of life and the transformation of both death-dispensing histories, and narratives thereof, in the service of life. The polyphonic method enables Joyce to make death the focus of an alternative historical trajectory by thematising in Ulysses what Michel Foucault calls a 'bio-history'. This alternative emphasis establishes such vital concerns as health and the quality of life as the true field of historical praxis and the criterion for evaluating historical initiatives.