Wings insists on representing Milly Theale's condition as a matter of cognitive reticence, yet refracts it through a twinned rhetoric of disease and economics, illuminating a coextensivity between pathology and commodification. Effectively, Kate Croy's undiagnosis of the consumptive verdict invites a broader consideration of consumption's mutating tropes, which figure appetitive relations as well as the assimilation of contagious impressions. If Milly does not definitively have consumption, she is nevertheless subjected to it. Her pecuniary ontology predisposes her to being used (up); however, as a figure for dead metaphor, she also exceeds death, and moreover, allegorizes the death of the overdetermined consumptive heroine.

This paper explores how figures of temporality, disfiguration and orgasm in the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Joyce's Ulysses come together to allegorise unreadability. I argue that the text's invocation of a ‘contretemps’ to figure a scene of indigestion elicits a temporality of shock, producing a counternarrative that thwarts (vomits up) the ostensible readability it purports. Moreover, the principles of ideality and transparency commonly associated with the sentimental mode are countervailed by the episode's transgressive rhetorical shocks: a public display of onanistic activity and the revelation of Gerty's ‘lame leg’. The text's renderings of Gerty's disfiguration as well as the orgasmic both work to allegorise unreadability; I also suggest that they ramify ontologically. Drawing on Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, I investigate the co-articulation of ontology and tropology in ‘Nausicaa’ to adumbrate a theory of ‘ontotropology’ — the figuration of ontology as an undecidable condition of tropological surfeit born out of temporal disjunction.