Imagined Authors: Reading the Homeric Question in James Joyce's Ulysses.

As she briefly notes, this delineation of Homer is reminiscent of Michel Foucault's "author-function": that "the name of an author is not precisely a proper name among others" but rather "points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture."[35] The "absent author" furthermore reaches forward again to Barthes: "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing" ("Author", 147). Stolen, mistaken, and confused identities weave their way through the "Eumaeus" episode of James Joyce's I Ulysses i : bodied forms of the lies and storytelling with which the episode is permeated.[1] A man spuriously named Lord John Corley mistakes Leopold Bloom for a friend of Blazes Boylan; the keeper of the cabman's shelter where much of the episode is set is "said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris, the invincible"; someone bears "a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk"; the story-telling and uncertainly named sailor D. B. Murphy transforms Simon Dedalus into a circus performer, and, when asked, Stephen Dedalus claims only to have "heard of him."[2] Though it is now rarely discussed in criticism, these malleable or questionable identities nudge at the unconscious Homeric roles played, for instance, by Bloom and Stephen, and further take their lead from the parallel episodes of the I Odyssey i . For the "Butler" of I The Authoress i (and Butler's other Homer-related writing) sees the author as the focus of literary scholarship: "art is only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist" intimates that this persona at least believes a "good reader" will be rewarded with a glimpse of the author (or an intimate knowledge and surety of her actions). [Extracted from the article]