James Joyce's work has many folded documents, bodies, clothing, souls—and these objects often contain a mystery within their folds, literal and figurative. In the story “An Encounter,” the strange man met in a field at Ringsend tells the young narrator how he would love to whip a boy “as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery” (Dubliners 20). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Stephen Dedalus feels “his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself” (110). Virtually every document in Ulysses is folded, unfolded, and often refolded, including Leopold Bloom's letter from his flirtatious correspondent Martha Clifford, his copy of the Freeman's Journal, his prospectus for the Zionist colony of Agendath Netaim, Stephen Dedalus's telegram to Buck Mulligan, the mentally disturbed Dennis Breen's cryptic postcard,...
Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce
DAVID SPURR is emeritus professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Geneva. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Basel, Zurich, Innsbruck, and Iceland, as well as a curatorship at the Bodmer Foundation Museum in Switzerland. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Consolation of Poetry: Ten Lessons on Life and Death (2021), and coeditor of three collections. His Architecture and Modern Literature (2012) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association of America.
David Spurr; Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce. Novel 1 November 2021; 54 (3): 362–378. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-9353748
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