Waiting on the Threshold in Ulysses

Abstract

Walter Benjamin described “thresholds” as sites of transformation, which were gradually disappearing from social life across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also elaborated the unique temporality of waiting which occurs on thresholds. This involves having the past flow through a subject to create openness to a new future. While Benjamin’s remarks on the decline of thresholds are partly a critique of the stasis that imperialism creates in the imperial metropolis, Benjamin does not extend his analysis outside this zone. I examine the valences of waiting and thresholds in the Dublin of Ulysses, one of the most threshold-ridden novels in modern literature. The opening episodes show the ways in which Irish subjects are told to wait by colonial powers. British power is justified through what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls a “waiting room” model of history on which Ireland must wait for imperially defined modernisation, and through what Priya Satia has traced as the mutually reinforcing valorisation of imperial action and moral absolution for it. The British equally promulgate the ideology that Ireland should remain in a fixed, fetishised past. Yet in “Sirens” we see how Dubliners themselves engage in forms of memory and national imagining which are mirror images of imperially imposed forms of waiting. A more positive valence of waiting in Ulysses comes into focus through Benjamin’s notion of the “weak messianic power” given us by the past’s persistence. By dwelling with the remains of the past’s unredeemed dreams, we may become connected to a new future that would realise those dreams. In the “Ithaca” episode, Bloom and Stephen are positioned on thresholds of reconciliation and postcolonial futurity. While the characters themselves do not engage in Benjaminian resistant waiting, I outline how the episode’s periphrastic prose style allows readers to do so, generating new, anticolonial futurities.