'Here He Ponders Things That Were Not': Potentiality and Actuality in Joyce’s "Ulysses"
-
Teresa Valentini [1]
-
[1] University of Toronto
University of Toronto
Canadá
-
- Localización: James Joyce quarterly, ISSN 0021-4183, Vol. 59, Nº. 1, 2021, págs. 107-122
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Undoubtedly, rivers of ink have been spilled on the famous lines of the opening section of James Joyce’s “Nestor” episode in Ulysses, where Stephen ponders things that were not:
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Yet not enough words have been spent on understanding the meaning of the Aristotelian concepts that Stephen invokes to answer his own questions: “It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible” (U 2.67–70, my italics). We may know what Aristotle meant when he defined potentiality and actuality, but what did Joyce mean? And why was it important to include a discussion on actuality and its inextricably related concept potentiality in Ulysses? Building on Giorgio Agamben’s reinterpretation of the Aristotelian categories of actuality and potentiality, I will examine how, in Ulysses, Joyce puts these Aristotelian modalities of being—potentiality and actuality—to a new use: a use that undermines the traditional distinction between actuality and potentiality and generates the conditions for an alternative understanding of being and history.
