Art is visionary, even prophetic, having the peculiar power to open before humanity as yet unseen worlds of experience, foreseeing or forecasting in history states of awareness and insight that can only later be taken possession of in fully formed speculative consciousness. Great works thus exhibit the uncanny capacity to suss out the unfolding path of human experience that as yet lies in any given moment still ahead of, or beyond us. Yet note my reliance here on the language of speculation, that is, the language of vision, to describe the process by which what art intuits of our coming experience emerges into consciousness with the progress of thought. Our thought, our conscious thought, is dominated by the metaphorics of certainty that depend at root on the objectified clarity of our sense of vision. To know something with certainty is to see it in our mind and make it visible in our language.
So it was when Krissy King began her study of olfaction in Joyce’s quasi-autobiographical novel that I could foresee that she would come up against the daunting challenge of rendering, or translating, the essentially unconscious experience of smell into the conscious language of literary critical exposition. The problems attendant upon this surfaced early on for her and led her, in conference, to a point of decision: would she be able to sniff her way through the enigmatic unconscious vapors of Joyce’s foray into his own quasi-objectified unconscious experience? She would have to find a way of opening her own experience to the freedom, the uncertainties, the anxieties of the unconscious that Joyce himself was seeking to liberate through his novel creative process.
This creative process would anticipate by half a century the clear critical formulation of Wimsatt and Beardsley of the “intentional fallacy,” that is, the realization that the full measure of what a work of art achieves could not finally be taken from the conscious intention of its author, even if such could ever be known. In other words, to do justice to this critical problem, Krissy would have to put herself in the creative place of Joyce’s own most open and even chaotic uncertainty. But should she have the courage to do so, she would be doing a certain honor to the very—you will see below that I shared with Krissy my close attention to this word in Joyce’s work—challenge that Joyce himself took on as he sought to find a new balance between actual lived experience and conscious reflection in leaving behind the cloistered security of the objective remove of speculative aesthetics to descend into the stink of the real world! At this moment a word of encouragement was in order: “go for it”! So it is that we leave it to her to lead us by the nose through the fetid alleyways and ethereal sublimations of Joyce’ s unconscious to inhale the incense of his most intimate and ineffable experiences!
— MICHAEL DEGENER