THE DEATH OF THE NARRATOR AND THE AUTHOR’S REBIRTH AS A TWOFOLD PLAYWRIGHT’S SELF-REFLEXIVE ACTANT IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES
THE DEATH OF THE NARRATOR AND THE AUTHOR’S REBIRTH AS A TWOFOLD PLAYWRIGHT’S SELF-REFLEXIVE ACTANT IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Summary/Abstract: To apply the cycle of birth, death and rebirth metaphorically to James Joyce’s Ulysses, we interpret as the ‘exitus’ of the narrator the term introduced in1932 by Joseph Warren Beach in The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique, ‘Exit author’ (which designates the obliteration of the author’s traces through the elimination of any direct narrating agencies in the text of experimentalmodernist narratives). Two keywords, one used in mid-book by Stephen Dedalus (inOxen of the Sun), the other, by Leopold Bloom in the novel’s last but one episode(Ithaca), explain, from within the Bloomsday story, the progression of the Ulysses text in the absence of a narrator. “The post creation” (U 14. 294) and “the parallaxor parallactic drift of so called fixed stars”, from U 17.1052-3) do this because they are both pronouncements made on the characters’ ‘paths’ and cause Stephen and Mr Bloom to become ‘passants’. The ‘path’ and ‘passants’ doublet, proposed by Peter Rabinowitz, in the 2005 Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory,circumscribe the implied author’s field of forces kept going between the postcreative and parallactic poles; they are also the self-reflexive poles of Joyce’s chronologically very careful narrative. These self-reflexive terms ‘rescue’ in(textual) action the ‘dead’ narrator and mediate the author’s unmistakeable ‘rebirth’. Thanks to the Blooms day crossing of the specific passants’ paths in Ulysses, Joyce readers can acknowledge the fulfillment of the dramatic desideratum pronounced by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (ChapterV): that genuinely advanced art should present its images in complete autonomy from the artist.

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