Joyce's "Pinocchioism": The Language of Lies in Joyce's Art

In this age of fake news, misinformation, fake reality and post truth, lies lying and deceit have grown so central as to have become in recent years the object of numberless inquiries, eflections and investigations for psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, scholars, scientists and even, very recently, the Pope.In such a climate, the literary critic (and even more so the critic who investigates Joyce’s texts) is inspired to turn a scrutinising eye to the literary cosmos, in search of lies, untruths, deceits, dissemblers, liars and fibbers in order to verify their presence, examine their function and explore their meaning in texts, plots, narrations, and even interpretations. The essay, which does not aim to be all-inclusive, will focus on some of the short stories in Dubliners in an attempt to prove the “hidden” centrality of untruth, both as simulatio and dissimulatio.