Joyce's Ghosts

Ireland, Modernism, and Memory

Luke Gibbons

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226526959, 9780226236179
• eBook ISBN: 9780226236209
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: Literature

For decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure.

In Joyce's Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a powerful argument that this view is mistaken: Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism, informing his most distinctive literary experiments. Ireland, Gibbons shows, is not just a source of subject matter or content for Joyce, but of form itself. Joyce's stylistic innovations can be traced at least as much to the tragedies of Irish history as to the shock of European modernity, as he explores the incomplete project of inner life under colonialism. Joyce's language, Gibbons reveals, is haunted by ghosts, less concerned with the stream of consciousness than with a vernacular interior dialogue, the "shout in the street," that gives room to outside voices and shadowy presences, the disruptions of a late colonial culture in crisis.

Showing us how memory under modernism breaks free of the nightmare of history, and how in doing so it gives birth to new forms, Gibbons forces us to think anew about Joyce's achievement and its foundations.

CHAPTER 1

Text and the City

Dublin, Cultural Intimacy, and Modernity

Our language can be seen as an ancient city; a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophical Investigations

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. . . . Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawlingsuburbs, jerrybuilt.

JAMES JOYCE (U 8.484–86, 491–92)

Writing of the renewal of her friendship with James Joyce—then “the most famous writer in the world”—in Paris in the 1930s, Mary Colum noted that “when he appeared in a café or restaurant people took tables near to have a look at him.” Not being in the business of instant familiarity, Joyce “always had a table facing the wall so that all anybody could see of him was the back of his head: his guests sat facing him.”1 In this cameo, it is possible to catch a glimpse of Joyce’s attitude to his work as well as to his personal life.2 For all its universality and cosmopolitanism—the appeals to myth, everyman, and the human condition—Joyce’s writing was also addressed to those who knew him, and his culture, well. Of those who gazed in wonder at the writer, Colum speculates that there may have been a few French people “in whom the life of Paris soaked in to their veins and pores as that of Dublin had done in Joyce’s case, but I doubt it”:

Nobody has ever written of the life of a city, so identified himself with that city and its history, as Joyce has with Dublin. The fact that he left it early and became a Berlitz teacher in Trieste, far from diminishing his impressions, clarified them, far from clouding his memory, made it more exact. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are the epics of a city, the histories of a city, and of all the languages somebody there might have understood or spoken. (LD 381)

1.1 Carola Giedion-Welcker, “James Joyce at the Platzspitz” (1938). Photograph courtesy of the James Joyce Foundation, Zurich.

Accounting for the manner in which Joyce’s Dublin opened onto the world, Colum notes that “cities grew up by rivers,” and the deposed capital of Dublin was already a tributary of both Europe and empire.3 Though Joyce quipped on one occasion that his work “would keep the professors busy for centuries” (JJ 535), the expertise required for reading his work derived not only from the academy and the literary world but also from familiarity with the streets of Dublin and the by-ways of Irish culture: “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal” (JJ 520). It was indeed the intimate address of Ulysses to native readers that constituted part of the scandal for his first Irish commentators, leading Shane Leslie, in one of the first reviews, to suggest that

it would be better for Ireland to sink under the seas and join Atlantis, rather than allow her life of letters to affect the least reconciliation with a book which, owing to accidents of circumstance, probably only Dubliners can really understand in detail. Certainly, it takes a Dubliner to pick out the familiar names and allusions of twenty years ago, though the references to men who have become as important as Arthur Griffith assume a more universal bearing.4

Arthur Griffith, who saw himself as Irish and Irish alone, would hardly have welcomed a “universal bearing,” and it is precisely Griffith’s assumption that a deep immersion in Irish culture precludes a wider embrace of the world at large that is contested in Ulysses.5 It was the constancy of Joyce’s engagement with “the familiar names and allusions of twenty years ago” that not only gave his fiction a belated dissonant role in the national revival (though revivalists were slow to recognize Joyce’s contribution) but also placed Irish literature at the forefront of international literary modernism. In the universal scheme of things, Ireland—its inhabitants, its culture, the material texture of Dublin itself—was still the interlocutor without which Joyce’s work made no sense: it is, after all, Anna Livia Plurabelle herself who directly addresses the city—and the reader—in the “Letter” section of Finnegans Wake: “Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing” (FW 619.20).

Asked on one occasion by Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington why he did not return to Dublin, Joyce replied: “Have I ever left it?” (JJ 717). It was perhaps Dublin that never left Joyce: as late as the 1930s he recounted to Constantine Curran that “every day in every way I am walking along the streets of Dublin and along the strand. And ‘hearing voices’” (JJ 717). The almost physical awareness of something not present evinced by Joyce is akin to the experience of loss presented by a “phantom limb,” as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945).6 In his account of the phantom limb, Merleau-Ponty asks: “Why can the memories recalled to the one-armed man cause the phantom arm to appear? The phantom arm is not a recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now, folded over his chest, with no hint of its belonging to the past” (PP 85).7 In emphasizing that the past is not only a memory but also a “quasi-present,” Merleau-Ponty evokes some of the most telling aspects of Joyce’s Dublin and the relational aesthetic at work in his fiction. The phantom limb arises from the fact that the body is experienced not as an assemblage of discrete parts but as a whole: just “as the beating of the heart is felt as far away as the body’s periphery” (PP 85), so also the periphery extends to the rest of the body, which is disposed to act as it did before the limb was severed.8 The phantom limb in this sense is close to the operation of “involuntary memory” in Proust or Joyce, in that a shock or acute event summons a specter into existence, even if the ghost is at odds with the world. Instead of being a pathology, moreover, the imaginary limb is on a continuum with the power of phantom histories to shape our lives, for as Robert Romanyshyn notes:

Just as one’s body can project and sustain habitual situations, it can also project and keep alive previous intentions, [and phases] of one’s history, which are no longer supported by the world. There can be, in other words, “a phantom history” just like there is a phantom limb, because this body through which one perceives, this sensitive flesh[,] is a history and this history is embodied.9

This is close to the version of Dublin that Joyce re-created in exile: the “fixation does not merge into memory: it even excludes memory in so far as the latter spreads out in front of us like a picture, a former experience, whereas this past which remains our true present does not leave us” (PP 83). A phantom history may be “no longer supported by the world,” but, as many critics have pointed out, part of the attraction of Pola, Trieste, and Zurich for Joyce lay in the resemblance of these cities to Dublin, a divided city on the edge of a ramshackle empire. As Austin Clarke recalled Joyce’s words following a visit to Paris: “Dublin is the nearest city to the Continent. Places here in Paris on a Saturday night are like Capel Street and Thomas Street. There are the same joy and excitement, as though bargaining for Sunday’s dinner was a holiday.” Dublin was “old enough to be viewed as a European capital; small enough to be viewed as a whole.”10 In this can be seen a version of the “working through” that Freud required of painful memories, in which it is not so much an original event or object (Dublin) that is carried over but, as Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire point out, the relations woven around it: “The Freudian experience of ‘memory’ has less to do with the recollection of an ‘event’ than with the repetition of a structure.”11

The extent to which Joyce’s past took on a relational intensity is clear from the circumstances in which he first encountered Martha Fleischmann in Zurich while he was writing Ulysses. Fleischmann, the mistress of a wealthy engineer, Rudolf Hiltpold, lived in an apartment in Zurich behind Joyce’s:

One evening at dusk when she was about to enter her house Joyce happened to pass by the door. He stopped abruptly and looked at her with an expression of such wonder in his face that she hesitated for just a moment before entering the house. Joyce then apologized in German and said that she very strongly reminded him of a girl he had once seen standing on the beach in his home country.12

Joyce’s attachment to the young woman, and her fascination with the writer, came to grief six months later when Hiltpold intervened to protect her from his rival. Joyce’s initial heartfelt remark to Fleischmann, that she captivated him because she was a reminder of someone else, may not have been a wise opening gambit, but it draws attention to the manner in which, on Merleau-Ponty’s terms, certain affective ties were drawn from Dublin, even if the content had changed: “Some subjects can come near to blindness without changing their ‘world’: they can be seen colliding with objects everywhere” (PP 80). Crucially, however, Merleau-Ponty contends that despite holding on to similarity, the phantom limb hinges on difference, albeit through disavowal, and in this it is not unlike the denial that often follows the death of a friend: “We do not understand the absence or death of a friend until the time comes when we expect a reply from him and when we realize we shall never again receive one; so at first we avoid asking in order not to notice this silence” (PP 81). It is as if Joyce’s fiction were a sustained attempt to break this silence, an imaginary world that broke into his private life at moments of seemingly irreparable loss.

It is striking that Martha Fleishmann evoked the “real-life” source for the apparition of the bird-girl—half real, half mirage—on Dollymount Strand in Portrait, an epiphany that follows Stephen’s first decisive break with Dublin, a place imbued with attachments of home and maternal love: “He was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives” (P 178). Yet though an apparition brings with it the obvious risk of disillusionment, Merleau-Ponty sees in the phantom limb vestiges of hope: “To have a phantom arm is to remain open to all the actions of which the arm alone is capable” (PP 81). It is only when the experience fixes pathologically on one irreplaceable object, and precludes a generality that extends beyond present loss, that the future is closed down. In an observation that throws light on the stylistic shift from first-person narration to the dual voice of free indirect discourse in Joyce’s work, Merleau-Ponty goes on to note that it is only the “transition from first person existence to a sort of abstraction of that existence, which lives on in that experience” (PP 83). Just as the body is experienced as a whole, even when incomplete, so also memory is comprised of moments that await completion in the future: “Every present grasps by stages, through its horizon of immediate past and near future, the totality of possible time; . . . time never completely closes over it” (PP 84–5). As Joyce was writing Ulysses, much of the material texture of central Dublin was being swept away in the rubble of the Easter Rising of 1916, and it is not surprising that many who looked back to the promise of that era should see in Ulysses “a former present which cannot decide to recede into the past. . . . [M]emory reopens time lost to us and invites us to recapture the situation evoked” (PP 85).

Conventional accounts of Joyce’s rise to literary eminence chart a well-worn trajectory from the local to the international, from the constricting provinciality of Dublin and Ireland to the heady freedom and expansive modernism of mainland Europe, whether in metropolitan Paris or the cosmopolitan circles of Trieste and Zurich.13 The imputation of parochialism to Irish letters overlooks the fact that London as well as Dublin publishing houses were in Joyce’s sights from the beginning, in keeping with a colonial condition in which national conversations were rerouted through foreign (and diasporic) locations: “[S]uch concessions to the English market,” writes Joseph Kelly, “were inevitable for Irish writers, if they wanted their books to be available in Ireland.”14 Though Joyce’s work was addressed to Irish readers—the “nicely polished glass” in which he imagined Irish people “having one good look at themselves”15—he was adamant that this did not preclude international audiences: “The second book I have ready is called Dubliners . . . . I do not think any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world.”16 By incorporating wider vistas into the act of addressing his own culture, Joyce was dispelling the myth of the insular Celt, the view that a society’s conversation with itself was at the expense of its entry into the world republic of letters. As Seamus Deane suggests, Joyce’s task was preeminently that of the colonial writer, “to take the cosmopolitan form that he has inherited from the colonizing country, the form of the novel, and to repossess that form, to if you like reconquer the territory of the conqueror, but via style: there is no other means by which it can be done.”17 The “shortest way to Tara was” indeed “via Holyhead” (P 273).

It is for this reason that free indirect discourse was central to Joyce’s techniques, a stylistic innovation that had a distinctive Irish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “A Ghost by Absence”
• 1: Text and the City
• 2: “Shouts in the Street”
• 3: “He Says No, Your Worship”
• 4: “Ghostly Light”
• 5: “Pale Phantoms of Desire”
• 6: “Spaces of Time through Times of Space”
• 7: “Famished Ghosts”
• 8: “Haunting Face”
• Notes
• Index