There are several moments in time that made me start thinking about the issues that eventually became the raw ideas behind my dissertation. The first occurred when I read James Joyce’s Ulysses in college (and I might add that it was casual summer reading; I was never required to read it until I was well into my Master’s program at ISU). In “Cyclops,” the narrator, thinking about Dignam’s death, the funeral, contemplating life and death, et-cetera, so-forth, and so-on, imagines a séance to call forth Dignam, and in this imagined-séance the following occurs:
It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was: We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C.K. doesn’t pile it on. It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H. J. O’Neill’s popular funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been responsible for the carrying out of the interum arrangements. (12.360-66)
Now, I am sure if your name is John, Mary, Michael, or some other regular incantation of this world, the appearance of your name in a novel or article is a semi-regular occurrence and you, most likely, give it very little thought, if any. I, on the other hand, was very strongly affected by this first sighting of “C.K.” in literature. My name is not Cornelius Kelleher. It is actually Clinton Kennedy Sample, III, but I have always been called and answered to C.K. That is my name. The other longer version is only for special documents like those involving taxes, lawsuits, and weddings.
Reading my name in Ulysses removed me totally from the text, from my process of reading, for a moment, but then it pulled me more forcibly back into the experience of reading, as I suddenly had a point of identification with the text. I wrote about this experience in a paper, entitled “Selfish Readers: Mrs. ‘The 20th Century Reader’ Dalloway-Bloom,” which I presented as part of the Names and Naming Society Special Session of the South Central Modern Language Association Conference held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on November 2, 2001. In that paper, I wrote:
At once I think, “There I am,” and with a smile I remark to myself that it is a just comment about me, that I do tend to pile it on at times. Simultaneously, I realize that this “C.K.” mentioned by Dignam’s ghost in an imagined séance in Ulysses is not me at all and was never meant to be me, that what is said by this fictional ghost has nothing whatsoever to do with real-life me. Perhaps, this in turn leads to a pondering over my name itself, how my name, the signifier for me, the signified, has nothing whatsoever to do with real-life me, how ultimately a “real-life me” is unknowable. Yet, these contending reactions are doubled in my current action of writing this paper, where I realize that this act of writing connects me and this “C.K.” in a way parallel to my original response upon first reading myself into Joyce’s text, and now in spending so much of this text discussing myself, I self-reprimandingly remind myself not to pile it on, again mirroring and doubling my connections with the text.
Cute, and it played well to my audience, but not as critically sharp as it should be. In the paper, I go on to examine how the characters of Leopold Bloom and Mrs. Dalloway model this type of identification for the reader, by actively looking for points of identification between their surroundings and their inner-thought-processes. These characters actively read their surroundings and the occurrences of their lives as part of an ongoing process of self-examination. I then look at how I participate in this reading-as-self-examination in my criticism. I also examine how both Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida use similar personal points of identification as their critical entryways to the text. The problem with the way I formed my argument in this paper was that it risked the pretension of placing myself on the same plane as Bloom and Derrida.
What I was really trying to examine, and what I am currently aiming my dissertation towards, is the ways that writing, reading, and criticism as twentieth century discourses become part of a larger process of self-examination on the part of the individuals participating in these discourses. This is the first and primary point of my dissertation, but there are other issues involved that make this self-examination more prevalent, I believe, in the twentieth than in the previous centuries…
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