On a conversation with the intestines

Reading Jung reading Joyce

Abstract

This essay proposes a return to the body that works within and beneath mental processes, be they rational or emotional, prior to the process of abstraction and symbolization that often characterizes attempts to account for the material body in literary representations. This essay proposes to reread a specific reading scene, in which Carl Jung reports on his difficulties in reading and making sense of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in “Ulysses: A Monologue” (1932). The present essay proposes some reasons as to why the textual confrontation between Jung and Ulysses has never received special critical attention, while it recalls the circumstances of the essay’s publication and discusses the state of Jungian criticism of Joyce. In a reading that starts from theories of affects, and based on the notion that a “Jungian criticism” depends on a strategy of “application”, it will be proposed that it is through resistance to application and to theory that Jung brings to light the body in Ulysses, an objectivity of the order of the unconscious, of what is not knowable. Paradoxically, the success of Jung’s analysis, in its approach to a “visceral thinking” and to a “peristaltic prose”, thus depends on the impossibility of confirming it.