Abstract

Presented as an unreliable ficto-critical memoir, this essay inconclusively examines the theoretical relationship between reading, mourning, touching, and responsibility as experienced by the author when confronted with a first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses and as the aftermath of this chance encounter unfolds. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning and its impossibility, I reinterpret the distance between the reader and the page as both an act of mourning and a touching poetic symbol of a responsibility to read faithfully before finally bearing witness to the transfiguration of Joyce’s body into the book, facing the revelation of a revenant Joyce, ontologically uncertain and still haunting this uneasy, untimely reading.

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