Abstract
Noting how Bloom displays a rare capacity to see Dublin through the eyes and minds of other people, this article aims at unravelling the skein of perspectival shifts in the book. Although Bloom and Stephen exist only as black marks on white pages, our brains are able to invest emotion in them as well as to attribute a weighty degree of truth-value to their introspective contemplations. Ulysses thus turns out to be the ultimate study in the twin concepts of Theory of Mind and Meta-representation, constantly requiring readers to pick up complex cues as to the intentionality of characters, to read not just their minds but the minds represented by these characters’ minds in an endless process of mental mise en abyme.
… atheists […] go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell […] I know them well who was the first person in the universe […] they dont know neither do I so there you are… (U 18.1566–71)
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Notes
- 1.
T. S. Eliot saw the fusion of the classical with the modern as Joyce’s way of “controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy” of the modern condition (Eliot 177–8). Ezra Pound thought the Homeric echoes as merely an affaire de cuisine (Kenner 2).
- 2.
Noam Chomsky argued that the formation of grammatically well-constructed sentences in one’s native language is reliant on a set of internalized represented rules that are not memory -based. This, Chomsky argues, is a particular feature of human communication and is not found in any other species. For a more detailed explanation, see Chomsky .
- 3.
The notion of the mind’s computational architecture supposes that the brain works as a sort of virtual connectionist computer which analyses the influx of data in the three-dimensional world and analyses the validity of that incoming data against what we know or think we know about the world from our experience of moving within it and interacting with others. Computational connectionism is recognized to reside in the domain of higher cognitive functioning, particularly abstract reasoning and language. For a more detailed explanation see Churchland and Sejnowski .
- 4.
Jennifer Levine points out that Joyce’s poetic language in Ulysses, the modifications of his mother-tongue, its cadences and grammatical structures (“Mrkrgnao” cries Bloom’s cat) assume a poetic model, which renders subsequent readings of the text “radically suspicious for they assume that things are not as they seem and that the truth lies under the surface” (Levine 130, emphasis mine).
- 5.
Theory of Mind (often abbreviated to ToM) is the brain’s ability to attribute states of mind—beliefs, desires, pretence, intentions—to oneself and others and to recognize that others can hold beliefs and ideas that are different to one’s own. For further information on how children display a Theory of Mind see Wimmer 103–28.
- 6.
Cosmides and Tooby argue that naïve realism in a scientific sense encompasses the notion that mental representations of the world are taken for the world as it actually is. The cognitive ability of the human species (Theory of Mind and Meta-Representation) sits in branches further along the evolutionary tree of mammalian lineages as we are capable of understanding our perception of the world according to the shifting lights of different perspectives (Cosmides and Tooby 59).
- 7.
Meta-Representation is defined as the brain’s ability to keep track of various levels of intentionality when the information is relayed orally; who is saying what about who to whom, in effect. For example, we can understand the following sentence that contains four levels of intentionality: Jane told Peter that David said he overheard Susan telling Bill that she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses. Interestingly, our brain reaches a limit of understanding at around four levels of intentionality. Some individuals can keep track of five or even six levels but any more than that and our brains are scrambled into confusion.
- 8.
Constantin Stanislavski argues that understanding a character’s desires and emotions in terms of “minor objectives” (localized action within a scene or chapter) and “super objectives” (the ultimate goal or desire of a character) helps us to understand his/her emotional trajectory within the work (Stanislavski 78). “Minor objectives” might propel Stephen from moment to moment, or into another episode. For example, he wanders on Sandymount Strand lost in his thoughts but this action must make sense in terms of his “super-objective.” The “minor objective” of wandering begins his larger wandering “super objective” of solidifying a spiritual and intellectual identity.
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Welby, L. (2018). Configuring Cognitive Architecture: Mind-Reading and Meta-Representations in Ulysses . In: Belluc, S., Bénéjam, V. (eds) Cognitive Joyce. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71994-8_11
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