The world of James Joyce criticism arrives at a distinct turning point with Jacques Derrida’s keynote address at the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt in 1984. By that time, Derrida’s influence on literary criticism had begun to spread epidemically from his native France to the United States and beyond. Derrida’s landmark work Of Grammatology, which served as the springboard for his theory of deconstruction, had been published just eight years prior. Derrida had made clear the importance of Joyce’s work to his own philosophical pursuits, and his lecture at the Joyce Symposium, wherein he applies his deconstructive criticism specifically to Ulysses, would have important consequences for Joyce criticism in the years to come.
This deconstructed paradox bleeds through to the level of critical discourse, Derrida argues, revealing the novel to be a “hypermnesic machine” (281) which invalidates the possibility of future salient criticism. Derrida’s final judgment of Ulysses, then, recognizes it as a novel that validates its own critical assessments and, simultaneously, renders those assessments meaningless, pointing to inherent deficiencies in language that leave the very critical assessments which it predicts stuck in a deconstructive black hole.
However, while “Aeolus” epitomizes the narrational estrangement Derrida touches on, it simultaneously reveals a shortcoming within Derrida’s ultimate characterization of Ulysses. While Derrida claims that Joyce’s metatextual discourse tacitly denies the possibility of future critical innovation, Derrida’s deconstruction fails to return from the level of meta-discourse. Rather than endlessly pointing inwards to predicted critical assessments or outwards to strings of inherently meaningless signifiers, Ulysses points forward, along the path of its own diegesis, extra-diegesis, and meta-diegesis, to pursue an ethical point.
Deconstructing that form-breaking episode reveals an infinite regress both inwards (through meta-diegesis) and outwards (through extra-diegesis). I posit that we may solve this problem by looking forward, through the diegesis, as the diegetic progress of the novel allows for interpretive stability and possesses ethical implications which stand apart from Derridean deconstruction.
Instead, we find that our own hopes and senses of morality are enriched and enlarged extra-textually as we are confronted with Bloom’s own moral struggles.
