Bloom’s Situated Mind in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Decoding Character in a Social Storyworld KERRI HAGGART A thesis submitted for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand November, 2015 ABSTRACT During the 1920s, James Joyce remarked that classical writers “show you a pleasant exterior but ignore the inner construction, the pathological and psychological body which our behaviour and thought depend on. Comprehension is the purpose of literature, but how can we know human beings if we continue to ignore their most vital functions?”1 This thesis responds to Joyce’s endeavour, using a theoretical framework derived from recent research in cognitive science to analyse human action and interaction as portrayed by literary character in Ulysses. Accordingly, it is interested in the narrative devices Joyce uses to realistically construct his protagonist Leopold Bloom. It questions how cognitive science can further illuminate, respond to, and rearticulate both how and why these devices work as they do. The cognitive approach employed departs from philosophies of Cartesian duality – where the mind is seen as distinct from and yet screened within the body. Instead, it aligns itself with more recent theory on actual minds – theory that suggests minds are externally interwoven in social and material environments. Informed by recent research in situated cognition, this thesis pays particular attention to the ways a character’s mind is situated in and accomplished by their speech acts and discourse, body and behaviour, environment and material reality. The lens provided by situated cognition magnifies the more common critical conceptions about Bloom to reveal how intricate threads of meaning criss-cross the character in a continuum of the mind as distributed through the social story-world. It demonstrates how thematic threads unfold through objects and characters in ways previous scholarship has not seen. These thematic threads constitute substrata which further i disclose the complexity and depth not only of Bloom’s character but also of Ulysses as a whole. Consequently, this thesis demonstrates, in response to Joyce, that cognitive approaches to literature do enable a better comprehension and deeper understanding of the human condition as portrayed by fictional characters. 1 James Joyce, cited in Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1999), 66. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. I TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................. III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................. V PREFATORY NOTE .................................................................................................................. VI LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................................................... VII INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 1 What Counts as Real? ................................................................................................................................. 2 What Counts as Evidence? ........................................................................................................................ 3 What’s Been Said Already? ....................................................................................................................... 5 Joyce Scholarship .................................................................................................................................... 5 Cognitive Literary Criticism ............................................................................................................... 7 What Episodes, What Cognitive Theory, and Why? ...................................................................... 9 A MARRIAGE OF MINDS IN “PENELOPE” .............................................................................. 15 Socially Situated Thoughts .................................................................................................................... 16 The Bakhtinian Voice and Reflexive Positioning ..................................................................... 18 Reversal Theory ..................................................................................................................................... 20 Social Languages .................................................................................................................................. 28 Reconciling Difference ............................................................................................................................ 34 MAPPING BLOOM’S MIND IN “HADES” ................................................................................. 42 The Socially Distributed Mind ............................................................................................................. 43 Discursive Events ................................................................................................................................... 44 The Embodied Mind ................................................................................................................................. 50 The Environmentally Extended Mind .............................................................................................. 54 Enaction .................................................................................................................................................... 55 Active Externalism ................................................................................................................................ 58 SEEING AND SAYING IN “LESTRYGONIANS” .......................................................................... 71 Seeing in Lestrygonians .......................................................................................................................... 72 The Mind’s Eye ........................................................................................................................................ 75 BlooM and Mrs Breen .............................................................................................................................. 76 Saying in Lestrygonians ......................................................................................................................... 80 BlooM in Davey Byrne’s Pub ................................................................................................................ 83 To See or not to See? ............................................................................................................................ 86 BlooM and the Blind Stripling .............................................................................................................. 87 BlooM and Boylan ..................................................................................................................................... 90 iii THEATRES OF EMOTION IN “SIRENS” ................................................................................... 97 Emotion Episodes ..................................................................................................................................... 99 The Precipitating Event or Trigger ............................................................................................... 99 Affective Salience ............................................................................................................................... 100 Feeling-Tone, Motor Embodiment and Visceral-Interoceptive Embodiment .......... 103 Conatus ........................................................................................................................................................ 107 Music, Meaning, and Emotional-Feelings ..................................................................................... 110 ATTRIBUTING BLOOM’S BEHAVIOUR IN “CYCLOPS” ......................................................... 121 Section One: Narrator/Character Attribution and IndividualisM ...................................... 124 The “Tinge” of the Community ..................................................................................................... 124 Individualism ....................................................................................................................................... 125 Bloom is a Shifty “Type” of Person .............................................................................................. 126 Bloom is a Prudent “Type” of Person ......................................................................................... 130 Bloom is a Talkative “Type” of Person ...................................................................................... 131 Bloom is an Argumentative “Type” of Person ........................................................................ 136 Section Two: Collective Discourses ................................................................................................. 137 Collectivism ........................................................................................................................................... 137 Foregrounding Situational Factors ..........................................................................................