Divine and Human Matters of Ireland: Messianic Allegory in James Joyce's Ulysses

The present article examines James Joyce’s Ulysses through the entwined lenses of messianic allegory, Benjaminian historical theory, and postcolonial critique. Departing from the conventional understanding of allegory as a system of stable symbolic correspondences, the article proposes a model of ‘messianic allegorical disruption’: a mode of figuration in which the ruins of history accumulate without resolution, salvation is perpetually deferred and meaning is produced not through closure but through interruption. The article critically engages with Stephen Sicari’s theological allegory and Gian Balsamo’s Derridean reading of messianic absence, identifies the limitations of both approaches, and develops a hybrid framework drawing on Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Paul de Man’s temporal theory of allegory and postcolonial readings of Joyce by Declan Kiberd and Emer Nolan. Through analysis of “Telemachus,” “Proteus,” “Circe,” and “Ithaca,” the article argues that Ulysses performs a messianic gesture without a messiah, establishing a structure of anticipation, postponement, and metamorphosis that resists both nationalist teleology and theological eschaton.