The Modern Irish novel has accommodated time as a flow of mental processes that deal with concepts such as Irish history, culture and politics. This conception of time, moreover, had not only appreciated time as a non-linear continuum, being rooted within the nation, but also treated time as a flexible ...
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The Modern Irish novel has accommodated time as a flow of mental processes that deal with concepts such as Irish history, culture and politics. This conception of time, moreover, had not only appreciated time as a non-linear continuum, being rooted within the nation, but also treated time as a flexible agent that finds meaning from within the individual. The protagonist, as a result, emerges in the modern Irish novel as an individual who defines time and temporality according to his personal desires and memories, creates personal time loops that would provide him with the liberty to distort time, and defies any form of State-sponsored conception of national history. By examining James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), this paper explores the emergence and at once treatment of time as a recalcitrant, self-referential literary agent that had helped the modern Irish author to defy a seemingly postcolonial State. To this end, theories of time introduced by Alain Badiou in his Being and Event, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Bergson will be closely referenced.