Joyce’s Prefiguring of “Deconstruction” Theory in “Proteus”

Abstract

This paper highlights correspondences between “Proteus” episode from James Joyce’s Ulysses with its reliance on the figure of metamorphosis as a structuring principle and Derrida’s “Deconstruction” not-yet theorized at the time. It details how Joyce pre-figures the theory itself. While Ovid’s Metamorphoses is mentioned in “Oxen of the Sun”, its configurations take place in the third episode of Ulysses which is devoted explicitly and implicitly to change. Everything is subject to othering and displacement: symbols, thoughts, language and of course the Homeric Odyssey. The metamorphosis motif is an adequate space for Joyce to resolve but also to problematize the dialects of present and past, time and space, self and other, presence and absence, signifier and signified and other Western dichotomies. Joyce alludes to the self-contradictory and destabilizing nature of things as well as the differing/deferral of meaning. While the differing and deferral of meaning is characteristic of Joyce’s writings in general, “Proteus” episode by referring to the shapeshifting God, refers explicitly to the practice of transformation and othering within the sameness and thus in a way pre-theorizes “différance” and becomes some sort of metalanguage for deconstruction.