“Wandering Temporalities”: Rethinking Imagined Communities through “Wandering Rocks”

This essay reconsiders the concept of nations as imagined communities through a close reading of the “Wandering Rocks” episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Modern nations are thought to be artifacts imagined through the sense of simultaneity facilitated by “homogeneous, empty time.” The wandering temporalities found in “Wandering Rocks,” however, challenge the validity of designating “homogeneous, empty time” as the time of the nation. Examined closely, the episode abounds in divergent, often conflicting, comprehensions of time. This, along with the social and political fragmentation represented, calls for a new conception of the national community that is congenial to heterogeneity and, therefore, more liberating.