Making Space in the Works of James Joyce 9780415997416, 9780203813379

Table of contents :
Cover
Making Space in the Works of James Joyce
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction Making Space
1 Space in Finnegans Wake. An Archaeology
2 Optical Space in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
3 The Acoustic Space of Ulysses
4 Text and the City. Joyce, Dublin, and Colonial Modernity
5 Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin. The Fabricated Cityscape of “The Dead”
6 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner Plumbing Consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin
7 Disorienting Dublin Eric Bulson
8 The Habitus of Language(s) in Finnegans Wake
9 Joyce the Post
10 Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’ The Echo of Leitmotifs in James Joyce’s Literary Landscape
11 The Thomistic Representation of Dublin in Ulysses
12 Writing Space
Contributors
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Before Auschwitz Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France Angela Kershaw

Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature Lindsey Michael Banco

Diary Poetics Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 Anna Jackson

Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change Race, Sex and Nation Gerardine Meaney

Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern Neil R. Davison

Travel and Modernist Literature Sacred and Ethical Journeys Alexandra Peat

Making Space in the Works of James Joyce

Bénéjam & Bishop

Axel Stähler

Making Space in the Works of James Joyce

Anglophone Jewish Literature

Edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop

Primo Levi’s Narratives of Embodiment Containing the Human Charlotte Ross

Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis Letizia Modena

Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David Alice Lee McLean

Making Space in the Works of James Joyce Edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop

ISBN 978-0-415-99741-6

www.routledge.com

an informa business

Making Space in the Works of James Joyce

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

1. Testimony from the Nazi Camps French Women’s Voices Margaret-Anne Hutton 2. Modern Confessional Writing New Critical Essays Edited by Jo Gill 3. Cold War Literature Writing the Global Conflict Andrew Hammond 4. Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty Andrew John Miller 5. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction Peta Mitchell 6. Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption Eating the Avant-Garde Michel Delville 7. Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema Jason Borge 8. Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics Les Brookes 9. Anglophone Jewish Literature Axel Stähler

10. Before Auschwitz Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France Angela Kershaw 11. Travel and Drugs in TwentiethCentury Literature Lindsey Michael Banco 12. Diary Poetics Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 Anna Jackson 13. Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change Race, Sex and Nation Gerardine Meaney 14. Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern Neil R. Davison 15. Travel and Modernist Literature Sacred and Ethical Journeys Alexandra Peat 16. Primo Levi’s Narratives of Embodiment Containing the Human Charlotte Ross 17. Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis Letizia Modena

18. Aesthetic Pleasure in TwentiethCentury Women’s Food Writing The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David Alice Lee McLean 19. Making Space in the Works of James Joyce Edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop

Making Space in the Works of James Joyce

Edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book.

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Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Making Space

ix xi 1

VALÉRIE BÉNÉJAM

1

Space Wake: An Archaeology

20

JOHN BISHOP

2

Optical Space in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

38

ANDRÉ TOPIA

3

The Acoustic Space of Ulysses

55

VALÉRIE BÉNÉJAM

4

Text and the City: Joyce, Dublin, and Colonial Modernity

69

LUKE GIBBONS

5

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin: The Fabricated Cityscape of “The Dead”

91

LIAM LANIGAN

6

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner: Plumbing Consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin

109

MICHAEL RUBENSTEIN

7

Disorienting Dublin ERIC BULSON

125

viii Contents 8

The Habitus of Language(s) in Finnegans Wake

145

LAURENT MILESI

9

Joyce the Post

155

DAVID SPURR

10 Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’: The Echo of Leitmotifs in James Joyce’s Literary Landscape

173

KATHERINE O’CALLAGHAN

11 The Thomistic Representation of Dublin in Ulysses

191

SAM SLOTE

12 Writing Space

203

DANIEL FERRER

List of Contributors Bibliography Index

215 219 231

Acknowledgments

Our thanks go fi rst and foremost to the contributors to this volume. From the moment when the idea for this collection emerged, in the wake of an International James Joyce Foundation Symposium in Budapest, and the fi nal completion of the project, many years and vicissitudes later, their patience and support have been both well tested and regularly found unfl inching. Valérie Bénéjam particularly wants to thank Laurent Milesi, who succeeded in making space, and time, in his extraordinarily busy schedule to advise her with the introduction. His help and friendship have been, as they always are, priceless. We also wish to express our gratitude to our editors at Routledge, Erica Wetter and Elizabeth Levine and to Michael Watters of Integrated Book Technology, Inc. Their assistance and counsel have been essential in making this book exist. John Bishop wishes to thank the colleagues who particularly inspired his thoughts. Special thanks go to Eric Falci, whose exciting new work on bilingualism in poetry gave him much new material to think about in regard to issues central to this book, and also to Dan Blanton, Mitch Breitwieser, Jay Fliegelman, and Mike Rubenstein: talking with them always made his thinking more complex and refined than it otherwise would have been. Valérie Bénéjam is grateful for the sabbatical semester, granted in 2007– 2008 by the French Conseil National des Universités, which allowed her to launch this project. Her thanks also go to her colleagues in the English Department at the Université de Nantes—particularly Marie Mianowski and Georges Letissier—who made this leave possible by taking on her teaching load and administrative responsibilities. In a different vein, she owes a heavy debt of gratitude to Larry Norman for his patience, availability, and invaluable help in reading her work and casting on it his generous critical eye. She also benefitted from discussions of this project with many friends and colleagues: Daniel Ferrer, Colleen Jaurretche, Vike Plock, Sam Slote, as well as Borbala Farago, whose good sense and encouragements were, as always, most precious. A portion of Michael Rubenstein’s essay “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner: Plumbing Consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin” already

x

Acknowledgments

appeared in his Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame University Press, 2010), and the original publishers are gratefully acknowledged. Valérie Bénéjam & John Bishop

Abbreviations

References to the publications listed below appear throughout this volume as abbreviations followed by page number, unless otherwise specified. Editions other than those cited below are indicated in the chapters’ notes and listed in the fi nal bibliography.

WORKS BY JAMES JOYCE CW

The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Eds. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959.

D

Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Scholes & A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1967.

FW

Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939: London: Faber & Faber, 1939. These two editions have identical pagination. References are by page and line, or occasionally by book and chapter

JJA

The James Joyce Archive. Ed. Michael Groden et al. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1977–79. Volume citation conforms to the one given in the James Joyce Quarterly.

Letters I

Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking, 1957; reissued with corrections, 1966.

Letters II

Letters of James Joyce. Vol. II. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1966.

Letters III Letters of James Joyce. Vol. III. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1966. P

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking Penguin, 1968.

xii

Abbreviations

SH

Stephen Hero. Ed. John J. Slocum & Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1944, 1963.

U

Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1984, 1986. In paperback by Garland, Random House, and Bodley Head, and by Penguin between 1986 and 1992. References appear as episode number plus line number.

U-G

Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York and London: Garland, 1984. References to the Foreword, Critical Apparatus, Textual Notes, Historical Collation, or Afterword.

OTHER WORKS AND JOURNALS JJI

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.

JJII

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

JJQ

James Joyce Quarterly

Whenever appropriate, abbreviations of other editions or texts frequently referred to will be introduced in individual essays.

Introduction Making Space Valérie Bénéjam

paperspace is a perfect signature of its own (FW 115. 7–8)

THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG GEOGRAPHER In the fi rst chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus attempts to concentrate on a lesson in his geography textbook, but he soon gets lost in considerations of the vast ensembles of countries and continents. He then turns to the flyleaf where he has written, Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe (P 15)

This is how the artist as a child envisions his position in space: he locates himself at the center of a widening series of concentric circles, elaborating a list that begins like a signature, soon turns into a postal address, but eventually evolves into a new, Stephen-centered cosmology. As such, the list contains a degree of irony: the beginning would seem to allow the book, if lost, to be returned to its owner, but this sequence of events becomes less and less likely as we move down the list and reach the universe. Stephen envisaging himself, or his lost textbook, at this scale is both a ludicrous and an impressive possibility.1 As absurd as it sounds, the list identifies the successive stages leading from microcosm to macrocosm, in the process positioning Stephen as the primary element and subjective individuality at the central core of this spatially ordered whole. Written on the flyleaf of the textbook, it inscribes subjectivity within—and even as the organizing principle of—the factual, objective, or political realities of official geography.

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Indeed, the list is not without implications regarding political divisions of space, as Ireland finds its place directly within Europe. Without the slightest hesitation, Stephen has sidestepped the alternative political ensemble of the British Empire. Eventually, we come to realize that individuality is also reflected on the space of the page we are reading: the list appears in italics, with a larger margin than the bulk of the text, in the process reminding readers of the little songs and poems that have been scattered among Stephen’s thoughts since the opening of the novel. Unlike those other budding literary productions, however, this one is typographically centered, thus creating variations of margin length on both sides, a potentially innovative play on literary conventions that both employs and signals the writing page as a spatial object involving specific and promising properties. The originality of Stephen’s writing becomes even clearer a few lines later, as we read what his friend Fleming has penned on the opposite page: Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation. (P 16)

A poor attempt at abiding by traditional poetic constraints, with its irregular metrical and rhyming schemes, Fleming’s quatrain flaunts its conventionality via a mildly mocking acceptation of political and religious dictates: while Stephen’s cosmology conspicuously lacked any transcendental dimension, Fleming positions heaven as the retributive conclusion to his little poem, and whereas Stephen’s phrasing factually situated Ireland within Europe, Fleming’s stands out as a more traditional nationalistic pronouncement. Paradoxically, although Fleming makes use of a fi rst person that contrasts with Stephen’s impersonality, his literary production, in regard to the spatiality it conveys, stands out as a lot less subjective and original. Idiosyncratically responding to the striking contrast between these two pieces of writing and the placements in space they each suggest, Stephen next decides to read backward, first Fleming’s verses, then his own lines, a process that eventually leads him to speculations about the infi nite universe, God’s all-encompassing comprehension, and the various names of God in different languages, which only He may understand (P 16). Beyond the naïveté of such theological musings, experienced readers of Joyce’s later works will have detected here two distinctive features of his more mature writing: an invitation to play with the space of the printed page (reading backward), and a fi rst, albeit timid, link between the organization of space and the post-Babelian multiplicity of world languages. In this fi rst instance of the young artist’s positioning can already be detected the treatment of spatiality that will unfold throughout Joyce’s work, and which this collection investigates: the prominence of individual perception and intrapsychic subjectivity, and their contrastive interplay with objective conceptions of

Introduction

3

space (geometry, topography, geography, astronomy, etc.); the variations on, and alternative versions of, conventional organizations of space (be they political, religious, scientific, or linguistic); and the parallel play on the space of the page (that on which the artist writes as well as that which the reader peruses). The stylistic, typographical and linguistic dimensions are from the start essential elements of Joyce’s spatiality, inseparable from the permanent humorous displacements in his writing. While the artist, as we hint in our title, both creates (and re-creates) his own space as well as makes space for his readers’ interpretations—including the Blanchotian “space of literature” in which the work of art endlessly unfolds and completes itself as readers welcome its generosity2 —in both instances he also “makes space” for jest and jokes. In the “Ondt and Gracehoper” fable of Finnegans Wake, Joyce reverts several times to the phrase “making spaces,”3 eventually letting us hear the “making spass” from which it evolves (from the German Spaß machen, to joke, to make fun of).4 Revealingly, the space (or Spaß, fun) made is always plural (“making spaces” as one would make faces): fi rst as the (literal) space opening on the page from the multiplicity of Joyce’s puns and portmanteau words (“paperspace” FW 115.7); second, as the past space of Dublin recreated ad infinitum and infi nitely fluctuating as it becomes transmuted into all kinds of different cities (for “Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?” [FW 558.33]); third, as the imaginary space created in the reader’s mind (“making spaces in his psyche” [FW 416.4–5]), a space which might be anywhere and therefore really exists nowhere: “Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned . . .” [FW 152.18–19]—erewhon, or in other words, ‘nowhere’ read backward, as in Samuel Butler’s satirical utopia.5 The displacements within, and discrepancies between, these various spaces open up other spaces and allow for even more Spaß/fun. Such is the endlessly generative quality of Joyce’s “spatialities” which we have wanted to suggest in our title, as well as the essential humour of Joyce’s “paperspace”: for if reading Joyce’s work is not fi rst and foremost about having Spaß/fun, all the eminent “spatialist[s]” (FW 149.19) who have contributed to this volume will have displayed their expertise in vain.

“FATHER TIMES AND MOTHER SPACIES” (FW 600.2–3) As we launched our quest and the project for this volume, it was with the conviction that one of the larger critical questions posed by Joyce’s work was what happens to space through the creative transmutation of his writing. Joyce’s preoccupation with space—be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical, or optical—obviously appeared a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. We soon found out, however, that space was indeed a traditional avenue of Joycean criticism, but one that had

4

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also traditionally been severely delimited, if not quickly discarded: while Joyce’s rendering of the urban space of Dublin has been extensively— and perhaps exhaustively—studied and documented, many early critics pointed to the predominance of time over space in his work. Between what would seem to be the exclusively urban nature of Joyce’s concern with space, and the belief that space somehow disappears in his writing, there would appear to be no opening for a broader reflection on spatiality in his work. Joyce’s rendering of the stream of consciousness and of the pace of early twentieth-century urban life both pointed his fi rst readers to the modernity of his treatment of time. Following the traditional dichotomy, this modernist rendition of time would have required a proportional disregard for spatiality, a tendency which well fitted the universalist aims of high modernism and its professed contempt for local color and particulars, as Joyce’s work supposedly discarded the representation of reality in favor of the materiality of language.6 Originally, the view that Joyce favored time above all else was perhaps most revealingly illustrated by the two opposed yet complementary responses to his work by Wyndham Lewis and Marcel Brion. Lewis was resolutely critical as he launched an attack in his 1927 Time and Western Man against the contemporary thinkers and artists (including Bergson, Darwin, Einstein, Proust, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, and Joyce) who, in his sweepingly negative view, were obsessed with time, either as adepts of pure time (Bergson) or as “space-timeist” (Einstein). Laurent Milesi has shown how Joyce himself answered Lewis’s criticism in the three episodes he drafted in 1927, which subsequently found their way into Finnegans Wake: “The Mookse and the Gripes” (in I.6), the parodic revision of Euclid’s First Theorem (middle section of II.2), and “The Ondt and the Gracehoper” (in III.1).7 It is through caricature and ironic allusions that Joyce responded to Lewis, mocking his approach and the very language of his accusations. It is also probably under Joyce’s guidance that Marcel Brion attempted to counter Lewis’s attack: “The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce” appeared in the 1929 collection of articles written by Joyce’s friends and collaborators, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of “Work in Progress,” in which its part was to defend Joyce’s treatment of time as well as underline his affi nities with Einstein. Brion made his point, however, by grossly simplifying the space–time dichotomy and offhandedly discarding the question of space in Joyce’s work as blatantly un-modern: “The fourth dimension is actually the only one that matters,” he wrote, adding: “Space is nothing—it is reduced every day by mechanical means of communication.” A few pages later he speculated that “Joyce could compose a book of pure time.”8 Rejecting the latter, clearly metaphorical, hypothesis, one could just as easily argue that the subjective reduction (rather than destruction) of space by modern speed does not entail its objective disappearance, but rather transforms its perception, and hence

Introduction

5

that modernity, far from annihilating the experience of space, only modifies and complexifies it. Just as Henri Bergson’s “duration” did not empty the concept of time of all meaning, space can only be enriched by the consideration of the experience of spatiality—in connection with Bergson’s “extension,” for instance, or with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “lived space.” As a temporary conclusion to this debate, it might be useful to remember that Joyce’s work often carries us beyond traditional, simplistic dichotomies—the space– time opposition among them, which he preferably treated as a space–time continuum. Indeed, in Finnegans Wake Joyce repeatedly plays upon the phrase “spaces of time”—an alliance of words already common in the Latin spatia temporis, where spatium is employed in the sense of a space/ period of time—and one rarely fi nds a reference to space in the book that is not closely followed with an allusion to time.9 The beginning of “Proteus” already mulled over this motif: “A very short space of time through very short times of space” (U 3.11–12): Stephen playing the blind man on Sandymount Strand, “a stride at a time,” realizes the ineluctable interaction of the modalities of the visual and the audible, of the nacheinander (succession in time) and nebeneinander (juxtaposition in space), which Lessing in his Laocoon artificially attempted to divide. “Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare” (U 3.23–24): if rhythm begins, not only with both seeing and hearing, but also with marching—a movement necessarily unfolding at once through space and time—then the artist can walk or gallop, decelerate or accelerate, but can no more discard space than he can dispose of time.10

URBAN SPACE: DOUBLING DUBLIN? In spite of the predominance of time over space in early Joyce criticism, there exists a long-standing tradition of considering the question of space in Joyce’s work, and of doing so particularly through the prism of urban spatiality.11 For many early critics, Joyce’s modernism lay primarily in his representation of cities and in his attention to the experience of everyday urban life, almost independently of Dublin’s specificities. As Ezra Pound plainly asserted of Dubliners, “[Joyce] gives us things as they are, not only for Dublin, but for every city. Erase the local names and a few specifically local allusions . . . and these stories could be retold of any town.”12 This is in keeping with Joyce’s famous statement to Arthur Power: “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.”13 In this sense, Joyce’s evocation of Dublin partakes, along with Virginia Woolf’s London,14 Walter Benjamin’s Paris, or Alfred Döblin’s Berlin, in a cosmopolitan trend of literature that explores the writing of modern city life in connection with modernist literary experimentations.15

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Against a parochial, possibly nationalist vision of Dublin as place, this view tends to privilege the modernity of urban space as it is experienced by any metropolitan inhabitant.16 This tendency of Joyce criticism, or rather the simplistic dichotomy upon which it seems to rely (national rurality vs. international urbanity), has been more than partially countered by the renewal of Irish studies, which has shown how Joyce combined, from his earlier writings, the familiar geographical details of Dublin life with a kind of spatial politics that allowed a critique of both colonial and nationalist univocal conceptions of space.17 Indeed, while refusing to limit the representation of Irish space to the rural, idealized Ireland of the literary revival, Joyce’s remapping of the Dublin territory aimed at a political liberation, in defiance of Dublin’s very motto (Obedienta civium urbis felicitas, the obedience of the citizens produces a happy city), which Joyce mocked in Finnegans Wake: “Obeisance so their sitinins is the follicity of this Orp!” (FW 494.21–22). As Anne Fogarty has shown in a remarkable article on the politics of space in Dubliners, the rich symbolic and psychic geographies of Joyce’s interior and exterior landscapes undermine any unitary or simplistic conception of Dublin and Irish space.18 Several of the contributions in our book follow this lead. Drawing on the politics of space, and particularly of urban space, Liam Lanigan demonstrates how the cityscape presented in Dubliners alienates its inhabitants. In an innovative analysis of “A Little Cloud,” he uncovers the ideological tenets of architectural and urban-planning conceptions that, subordinating the individual to a rational, integrative urban system, influence the uncomprehending Dubliners. But Lanigan also shows that Joyce later presents in Gabriel Conroy a character capable of an original, personal reading of the city around him, as “The Dead” introduces a more complex relationship between space and character, and intimates the possibility of other, multiple and contradictory, interpretations of Dublin. Likewise concerned with urban planning, Michael Rubenstein’s essay offers an original postcolonial interpretation of Joyce’s interest in public works as engineering national consciousness in relation with the utopian promise of modernity. Rubenstein fi rst focuses on waterworks in the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, subtly combining historical elements with narratological analysis, to demonstrate that Joyce presents in the sewer an image of the conscience and consciousness of the city, even employing the technologies structuring urban space as the epistemic basis of his fiction. Subsequently focusing on “The Dead,” Rubenstein points to gaslight as the essential trope pervading the story, both as narrative and infrastructural medium, and offers in passing a thought-provoking reading of the character of Michael Furey, no longer the embodiment of rural Ireland, but on the contrary of the modernized space of Ireland transcending the traditional rural/urban dichotomy. By taking infrastructural, communal space into account, Rubenstein redefines the spatiality of nationhood and, on that basis, reconstrues narrative space.

Introduction

7

Both these contributions accompany Luke Gibbons’s powerful reading of Joyce’s recovery of the Dublin territory. Gibbons takes his point of departure in the remark that Joyce’s representation of space is informed by his addressing in priority those familiar with his culture. Moving, however, over and beyond the sterile dichotomy of modernity vs. Irishness, Gibbons connects the formal and linguistic innovations of modernism with Dublin and Irish culture, thus pointing to the “colonial modernity” of Joyce’s writing. Considering the wider question of the representation of space, he shows how Joyce placed historical circumstances and spatial particulars at the very core of his work, thus radically reshaping the complex relationship between text and spatial context. Ulysses achieves the feat of triggering in Dublin residents an aesthetic, defamiliarizing response to the city, while also conveying an effect of lived space to those who are not familiar with Dublin. The wider question of the representation of space is indeed crucial to the ontological status of Joyce’s Dublin. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce often plays on the local pronunciation of Dublin, making it sound like “doubling,” and thus hinting at the possibility of producing a doppelganger (or “doblinganger” [FW 490.17]) of his native city.19 But whether Joyce’s text is haunted by Dublin or the reverse might be difficult to assess. The real Dublin may in fact be “doubled” by Joyce’s Dublin, and its present-day incarnation haunted by Joyce’s literary cityscape, as reader-tourists daily walk its concrete, material space with quotes and episodes from his works in mind, and re-create the space of 1904 Dublin every June 16. As the Irish Tourist Board certainly knows, and knows how to advertise, Joyce’s work, and particularly Ulysses, has become a prism for the touristic exploration and exploitation of the city. Although this evolution is most revealing of the suggestive powers of Joyce’s book, one would nevertheless refrain from equating Ulysses with a mere document testifying to the both picturesque and dreary reality of early twentieth-century Dublin.20 While claiming that Dublin, if destroyed, could be rebuilt from his work, he probably did not foresee that its international appeal would one day lie in the use of his masterpiece as a city guide mapping the routes of tourists adopting the trajectories his characters followed on Bloomsday. Joyce’s own travelling, as proven by the concluding words of Ulysses (“Trieste, Zurich, Paris”), was more centrifugal than centripetal, and at times the self-exiled writer went so far as to envisage the phantasmal disappearance of his heimlich (or unheimlich) hometown. “‘I want,’ said Joyce . . . ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book’.”21 This famous pronouncement was revealingly uttered while “walking down the Universitätsträsse” in Zürich, in other words as Joyce was well away from his native land and trying to position himself, with Pound’s benediction, as an internationally renowned writer in continental Europe. Joyce always wrote about Dublin from afar and, particularly in Finnegans Wake, progressively included more and more other cities within the representation of his hometown.22 As

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Gibbons notes, such a project aims at recreating rather than reproducing the original space he had left behind. However, it is in terms of reproduction that a number of Joycean critics have treated the question of urban space in Joyce’s works. As Eric Bulson demonstrates in his contribution, this has for some time been dominated by the topographical approach of literary cartography, inherited from the fi rst literary maps made of the cities in nineteenth-century realist novels (Dickens’s London, Balzac’s Paris, etc.) and perfected by newly available computerized means.23 Bulson, however, notes that Ulysses is both an eminently mappable novel and perhaps the most incredibly disorienting book ever written. In fact, although Joyce himself made much use of maps, 24 and much use of maps may be made to understand his work, his writing also offers a deconstructive approach to the very process of the cartographic representation of space, as the beginning of the “Ithaca” episode in Ulysses offers ample illustration: What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning? Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner’s place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George’s church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends. (U 17.1–10) This both perfectly exact and utterly disembodied representation of Bloom and Stephen’s trajectory exposes the limits of a cartographic representation of real space, and as the end of the citation reveals, does so in connection with the geometrical modelization of topographical representation. The very use of maps implies the superimposition on real, lived space of the mathematically defi ned, bi-dimensional Euclidian plane, which presupposes that any shape or movement may be described by an equation based on Cartesian coordinates. This unpalatable approach to spatiality is the exact contrary of what readers of Ulysses have encountered before being confronted with the acidities of “Ithaca.” Until now, they have felt and experienced Dublin, they have been made to feel as if they lived there. 25 As Bulson notes, unlike Dickens’s London or Balzac’s Paris, which stand as introductory backdrop, creating an atmosphere before the narrative zooms in on a set of characters, Joyce’s Dublin is immediately rendered from within. In accordance with the useful distinction elaborated by one of the most famous theoreticians of space, Henri Lefebvre, readers of Joyce encounter Dublin as lived space, not as conceived space, not as mappable abstraction: “The architect (and the urbanist) has a representation of space based on the graphic mediation of

Introduction

9

plans and perspectives which is a conceived space which is totally different from and cannot accommodate the lived space of real people.”26 Bulson’s paradoxical response consists, not in getting rid of maps, but in employing them to get lost in Ulysses. Drawing his inspiration from the Situationnistes’ dérive and détournement, Bulson reads Ulysses as an invitation to produce rather than passively consume space. In rendering the lived space of Dublin, Joyce turns our attention to the urban social fabric and collective imagination that shape urban spatiality. 27 These developments become essential when connecting the question of space with that of gender. The limitations touching the possibilities for movement and the spheres of action for women are very palpable in Joyce’s writing, from Dubliners onward. 28 As Fogarty has analyzed, Joyce often turns our attention to the “phantasmal space of female longing,” contrasting it with the physical entrapment of women’s bodies in the space of the home. 29 Even Molly Bloom’s powerful affi rmation of desire remains spatially contained: spending Bloomsday at home in Eccles Street, she is the still center of Leopold’s musing and of his successively centrifugal and centripetal trajectory. While one may contend that she gets the last word and as such embodies Joyce’s modernist aesthetics, 30 in spatial terms, even considering the material space of the book, one cannot avoid the feeling that she fi nally stands—or lies rather—on her own, in a monologue which may give the impression of overflowing all constraints and restrictions, but yet remains isolated and bound within the spatial limits of the “Penelope” episode. It is, however, in overstating such spatial limits and social limitations that Joyce’s writing is most efficiently subversive. Thus his experimenting with female interior monologue is closely bound with his exploration of interior space, and particularly efficient in its aim to deconstruct gender constructions.31 Female interior space often appears as the dark double of the predominantly male space outside, and the analysis of Joyce’s gendered space unearths a powerful critique of stereotypes that undermines the binaries of traditional gender categories.32 However, while keenly aware that gender is a fundamental aspect of the spatiality in Joyce’s works, we could not but notice how prominently it already features on the critical agenda: except as a tangential concern in some of the essays, it has therefore not been further mined in this volume.

SPATIAL PERCEPTION Preceding Lefebvre’s notion of “lived space” is that of “perceived space,” or in other words, a conception of space centered on the body. In Joyce’s work also, perception is at the very heart of the rendering of space, as sensations, more or less disrupted, more or less consciously elaborated, are focused upon as the mediation between the outside world and intrapsychic space. As previously evoked, the relation between space and subjectivity, between landscape

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and mindscape, is not an utterly new development of fiction. Problematizing this relation and focusing upon its very ontological status, however, may be unprecedented. In nineteenth-century realist novels such as Dickens’s, or in the panoramic openings of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories, for instance, the narrative often opens with a visual presentation of the space where the characters will evolve, one that is already suggestive of their moods, modes, or destinies. Such visual spatial introductions are rarely present in Joyce’s work, with the notable exception of North Richmond Street that opens the “Araby” story in Dubliners. The notion of sight, however, is strangely embedded at the very core of this presentation, since it is the street itself that is characterized as blind, and the houses gazing imperturbably at one another (D 29). There is no human or anthropomorphic gaze surveying the scene, but the décor itself seems to be looking down at the boys coming out of the Christian Brothers’ School. Joyce’s metaphor thus operates a reversal of traditional realist introductions and announces his future deconstruction of the visual apprehension of space. When in Ulysses we read the mock stage-direction décor description that opens onto both the Mabbot street entrance of Nighttown and the improbable delirium of “Circe,” any expectation of a visual representation of space promptly dissolves: the question of representation, in the sense of giving both a likeness and a theatrical production, is thoroughly disrupted and soon erupts into the phantasmal, hallucinatory dimension that is the episode’s hallmark.33 The intrapsychic space that opens up before us would be hard to measure scientifically: it is a multidimensional, movable, fluctuating entity. Analyzing the perception of space in Joyce’s works is the aim of the fi rst essays in this collection. Focusing on optics and on the complex circulation of gazes at work in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, André Topia presents us with an interesting phenomenology of vision, envisaging the gaze as an optical lens mediating between exterior space and interior mental space. Topia offers an in-depth analysis of the characters’ troubling exchanges of looks, of their often illusory command of their own visual fields, and shows how this dysfunctional optics ends up creating a geometrical transformation of space. Alterations in vision concomitantly entail alterations in the appearance of the world and in the sense of space and spatiality. These observations can also be related to biographical data. “Space, what you damn well have to see” (U 9.86), muses Stephen in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses. One cannot help but wonder about Joyce’s own impaired vision, and how it necessarily entailed his reliance on (and therefore conscience of) other means of perceiving space, how it could not but lead him to question the general preeminence of sight in the apprehension of space and in its literary rendering. Seeing space is not only the traditional diegetic requirement for constructing a narrative, it also soon became a prediegetic incapacity of the living author, as Joyce’s visual apprehension was de facto progressively reduced. Roy Gottfried has

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already studied in depth how Joyce’s impaired vision had influenced, not only the matter, but also the very material of his writing, and particularly his tendency to envisage the linguistic medium as problematic materiality.34 It was in part Joyce’s deteriorating vision—and his consequent exile from the conventional worlds of visual and Cartesian space—that enabled him so productively to map out aspects of space that lie beyond or outside the visual, making him perhaps in that sense an exemplary modernist writer. It is self-evident that the reduced sense of sight would produce a heightened reliance on other senses, especially concerning the apprehension of space. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we usually remember Stephen’s broken glasses as triggering the dramatic scene of unfair punishment with the prefect of studies. It is also, however, the original impression that launches a poetic apprehension of lived space, centering on sounds and rhythms: “And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricketbats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl” (P 41). The magic of sound, through which the cricket bats give their own soothing, flowing answer to the riddles troubling the schoolboy, is made even more vivid by Stephen’s broken glasses: acoustic perceptions compensate for visual impairment, helping to develop the budding artist’s own, poetic inner speech. This is the path that I have chosen to develop in my own chapter, “The Acoustic Space of Ulysses”: focusing on Joyce’s interest in the acoustic properties of space and in these properties’ ability to defi ne and render space, I contend that the sense of space readers get from the book is in great part made up of acoustic notations, a phenomenon nourished from Joyce’s well-known interest in music, but also from his probable knowledge of scientific acoustics.35 But beyond sight and hearing or any other sense on which Joyce relies to give us the rich, complete impression of spatiality we derive from his books, the very foundation of the apprehension of space lies in the unconscious and in the primal experience of intrauterine space. This is why this collection opens with John Bishop’s “tour of space in Finnegans Wake.” Bishop draws from the “quasi-amniotic spatiality” of sleep in Finnegans Wake, from which unfold more evolved forms of space, to investigate how one’s sense of space develops from infantile consciousness, moving from maternal spatiality toward the elaboration of an “intimate geometry.” Observing how Joyce suggested that spatial dimensionality is an emanation of the body, and in the process questioned the very structuring of the space we live in, Bishop shows how the disrupted geometries and geographies of Finnegans Wake testify to the cultural transformations by which classical Aristotelian conceptions of place were gradually replaced by the modern notion of space, abstract and infi nite, isomorphic and immaterial, homogeneous and unitary. Not only is it via language (or “landuage” [FW 327.20]) that Joyce conveys his original sense of a both familiar and defamiliarized lived space, it

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is also through a caricature of their idiolects that he elaborates his critique of the traditional scientific or political organizations of space. In this sense, Joyce’s experimenting with the linguistic medium can be understood as an answer to Lefebvre’s complaint that “[l]anguages are spoken and written in a mental space-time which Reason tends to privilege metaphysically. They enunciate poorly the social time, the spatial practice. The words are lacking to explain our spatiality.”36

THE LINGUISTICS OF SPACE If the perception of space is the prerequisite to a discussion of Joyce’s urban space, the consequences of this discussion inevitably lead to linguistic considerations. Indeed, Joyce’s foregrounding of the materiality of language, together with his focusing on the urban space of Dublin, has often led critics to draw analogies between his books and city space. In a French introduction to Joyce’s work, Jean-Michel Rabaté has compared one’s progress through Ulysses to one’s fi rst visit to a large metropolis, which may be attempted with a guidebook or a map, or just the chance advice of a passer-by.37 Developing a similar idea, in his commentary on “Wandering Rocks”—the Ulysses episode that best captures the experience of living in a city—Richard Brown has proposed “reading the city as a kind of text and the text as a kind of city,” remarking how reading the chapter could be compared to “experiences of orientation and disorientation in an unfamiliar urban space.”38 The relation is thus twofold: if reading Joyce conveys the experience of moving in the urban space of Dublin, the experience of reading Joyce is itself analogous to moving through urban space. The last series of chapters in this collection investigate spatiality in its relation to language(s) and to Joyce’s work with the very materiality of his medium. Milesi’s chapter plunges us at the heart of this question, drawing on the Derridean notion of hospitality to consider language itself as a space, as a house we inhabit and that inhabits us. Milesi analyzes the language in Finnegans Wake as a space where is staged the drama of reconciliation between estranged and local languages and culture, where all languages are allowed to interact and coexist, in a movement of de- and recolonization that welcomes the other within, through hybridity and miscegenation. He convincingly demonstrates how the Wakean idiom develops, beyond the staging of geolinguistic dramas, a veritable “spatial ethics.” Working within a similar theoretical framework, and also interrogating the relation to the other, David Spurr’s contribution offers a completely different contribution, in the form of a new outlook on the question of the post in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Analyzing the postal system as organizing the deployment and transmission of language through space, Spurr draws a parallel between the postcards and letters endlessly circulating throughout the space of Dublin in Joyce’s books, and the books themselves. He shows

Introduction

13

how this is indissociable from the problematic of desire between the subject and its other, and from the delay, displacement and distancing involved in desire itself. Connecting this approach with the essays on urban and social space, Spurr perceptively remarks that “Joyce’s space is not just there; it is rather something produced, ultimately, by the forces of power and desire.” The relation between language, distance and desire that stands at the heart of Joyce’s symbolic spatiality also draws the attention of Katherine O’Callaghan in her chapter, but via the original angle of music and music theory. Observing the recurring musical motif of a beckoning call from afar throughout Joyce’s work, O’Callaghan analyses the geographical quality of this call, which points to Joyce’s own exilic condition, and investigates the perpetual tension thus created, as the call both evokes the space between and promises a reconciliation that will bridge the gap. Drawing on Joyce’s interest in music, Callaghan further elaborates on themes developed in the fi rst contributions in the book, particularly my own on acoustic space, and like Spurr’s essay she connects the linguistic and intrapsychic dimensions of space. The last two contributions in this collection also look back toward the fi rst series of chapters on spatial perception in its most concrete sense, as they investigate the space that Joyce himself pored over as he was writing, the space of his manuscript pages as well as that of the pages of Thom’s Directory he consulted when writing Ulysses. Contributing to the debate on the representation of Dublin in Ulysses, Sam Slote observes the essential part played by Thom’s in Joyce’s rendering of his native city, to conclude that Joyce presents us in fact with an “already textualized city,” and an “ineluctably errant” representation. Indeed, Slote investigates the numerous errors in Thom’s, which leads him to see in the directory an inevitably erroneous mediation, and further, to observe the consequent imperfection of the established texts of Ulysses, since many editorial interventions rely upon topographical veracity. We come to see how the relation between space and language, and between topography and typography, remains problematic even in the transmission of Joyce’s texts, in establishing the very “paperspace” he would have wanted to set before our eyes. The last chapter in our collection, Daniel Ferrer’s evocation of Joyce’s writing space, also investigates Joyce’s writing habits: it takes its departure from this very metaphor of “paperspace,” which he interprets quite literally as the space that Joyce most gazed at—the space of his manuscripts and notebooks.39 Ferrer gives a fascinating account of the mechanism and dynamics of Joyce’s writing, leading us to the very heart of the transubstantiating process of literature, by describing the layout of these manuscripts, the revisions, the expansions, the occupation of space on the page, and particularly the relation between the basic text and the marginal material. He interrogates this marginal space as the limit between the text and its other (including the external sources and their treatment in Joyce’s notebooks), revelatory of the relation between the text and its own becoming. Ferrer’s

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inspired description of the spatial characteristics of Joyce’s manuscripts convincingly illustrates his hypothesis that the published work has retained the memory of all the states it went through, and offers an apt conclusion to our investigation of what happens to space through the creative transmutation of Joyce’s writing. The chapters in this book move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intrapsychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban, and collective. In accordance with Kant’s positing of space as an a priori category of perception, but also with Joyce’s own focus on subjectivity, the fi rst contributions thus approach space at its most concrete and phenomenological—as lived, intimately perceived, and unconsciously constructed. Joyce’s rendering of the city space of Dublin is granted the second, but central place in the book. Aware that this avenue of criticism has been much researched already, we aim to revisit the theme and to regenerate its traditional problematic by questioning and deconstructing the traditional assumptions about the Dublin which Joyce would have faithfully reproduced, thus salvaging it from the passing of time. Finally, as Joyce’s formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, urban and social space eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. And by the now proverbial “commodius vicus of recirculation,” the fi nal genetic contributions bring us back to spatial perception, to the very space Joyce perceived and worked with, that of his sources, notebooks and manuscripts. We have thus come full circle in our attempt to understand the transmutation of space through Joyce’s writing—from the study of his manuscript pages to that of the book pages we are reading, via the urban space of Dublin, the experience of lived space and the powerful sense of spatiality they convey—to envisage how Joyce’s space is made, and always makes space for more Spaß. NOTES 1. In spite of this fi rst allusion, it should be clear from the start that we have decided in this book to discard the astronomical acceptation of space. Joyce’s interest in astrology is well known, as proven by the mystical significance he assigned to birthdays all his life, and the anecdote of his father’s last words, which provided the exact time of Joyce’s birth—a piece of information he needed so that an astrologer could read his horoscope (cf. JJII 642). Much studied also is the analogy between Joyce’s narrative technique of multiple focalization and the parallactic mode of astronomical calculation, which assesses the distance of a celestial body from the earth by observing it from two different terrestrial viewpoints and evaluating the angle between each line of observation and the terrestrial diameter. See Bernard Benstock, Narrative Con/Texts in Ulysses (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), particularly Chapter 3, “Parallax as Structure,” 71–91. 2. Cf. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, (University of Nebraska Press, 1982). See particularly Part VI, “Communication and the Work,” 189–208, in which Blanchot presents the act of reading as a welcoming gesture opening up a space where the book becomes work, where

Introduction

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

15

what used to more or less make sense does not have a fi xed meaning yet. Such is the reader’s hospitality to the work’s generosity. The continual tension between the necessary distance at which the work must be kept and our desire for intimacy also points to the renewed deployment and completion of the work in history, its promise of an unlimited future. “ . . . the Ondt, who, not being a sommerfool, was thothfolly making chilly spaces at hisphex . . .” (FW 415.27–28), “[the Ondt] was sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairman-looking” (FW 416.4–8). “The Ondt, that true and perfect host, a spiter aspinne, was making the greatest spass a body could . . .” (FW 417.24–25). See the two maps of “Daylit Dublin” and “Swamplit ‘Nilbud’” in John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 32–35, and Bishop’s analysis of the confl icting spatialities of Finnegans Wake, 150–173, “one a geometrically constructed space accessible to vision and reason, the other an ‘infrarational’ dimension out of sight and out of mind” (172). See, for instance, Heinrich Straumann’s testimony: “In answer to my question, as to whether a knowledge of the local conditions in Dublin would make the reading of Finnegans Wake any easier, [Joyce] replied fi rmly in the negative. One should not pay any particular attention to the allusions to place-names, historical events, literary happenings and personalities, but let the linguistic phenomenon affect one as such.” “Last Meeting with Joyce,” trans. Eugene and Maria Jolas, in Maria Jolas ed., A James Joyce Yearbook (Paris: Transition Press, 1949), 114. See Laurent Milesi’s “Killing Lewis with Einstein: ‘Secting Time’ in Finnegans Wake,” in Finnegans Wake: Teems of Time, ed. Andrew Treip (European Joyce Studies 4) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 9–20, as well as this collection of articles in its entirety on the question of time in Joyce’s work. Marcel Brion, “The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of “Work in Progress” (London: Faber, 1972 ed.), 26 and 31. As for instance in the reference to “Father Times and Mother Spacies” (FW 600.2–3), where Chronos and Gaïa fi nd themselves rechristened to illustrate again the age-old pairing of space and time. Or again in the “Mookse and Gripes” fable: “Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser?” (FW 154.25–26). On this question, see also Wim Van Mierlo, “Traffic in Transit: Some Spatio-Temporal Elements in Finnegans Wake,” in Finnegans Wake: Teems of Time, ed. Andrew Treip (European Joyce Studies 4) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 107–118. The space–time opposition necessarily brings to mind Joseph Frank’s epochmaking essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945), in which he contends that “literary works are apprehend[ed] . . . spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence,” their elements “juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time.” Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 10–12. Frank contends that modernist works of art (Eliot, Joyce, Proust) are “spatial” in replacing temporal narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and in disrupting the traditional linearity of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. The reader is led to apprehend the work spatially, in a moment of time rather than as a linear sequence. The distinction between the space-logic of synchronicity and the time-logic of diachronicity is in fact borrowed from Lessing’s Laocoon, just like Stephen’s nacheinander and nebeneinander in

16

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

Valérie Bénéjam the opening of “Proteus.” Although Frank’s “spatiality” probably constitutes the fi rst use of this term as a concept of literary criticism, I have not included it in this consideration of the opposition between time and space in early Joyce criticism, judging that “spatial” would be given misplaced concreteness in this context, as Frank is not exactly concerned with concrete space and the experience of spatiality. Given the necessarily temporal nature of reading, I believe he uses the term metaphorically (but see Frank’s own answer to this in “Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics,” The Idea of Spatial Form, 67–106). Frank’s emphasis on autonomous structure would later come to exemplify the hegemonic, elitist discourse of the “autonomous or autotelic text” which distances both writer and reader from “the historicity of being-in-the world”: William Spanos’s Heideggerian and existential criticism, as it fi rst deployed itself in boundary 2 in the autumn of 1972, launched its attack against this spatialist aestheticism of modernism, fi rst described by Frank, accusing it of discarding a more temporal and existential axis. See William Spanos’s “Rethinking the Postmodernity of the Discourse of Postmodernism,” in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1997), 66–67. See also his essay in the inaugural issue of boundary 2: “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination,” boundary 2 1:1 (2000), 147–168. Among the most recent illustrations of this trend would be Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism, ed. Desmond Harding (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), as well as Joyce and the City: The Significance of Place, ed. Michael Begnal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002). See also Richard Brown’s renewed evaluation of the experience of the city in Joyce’s work, which envisages space as both material, symbolic and social, basing his study on postmodernist cultural criticism (particularly Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life) in “Time, Space and the City in ‘Wandering Rocks’.” Brown shows how Joyce illustrates the experience of modern cities, adopting new strategies to deal with the traumatism and impersonality of urban life: the necessary distancing is attained either by situating his characters in “liminal” (and “libidinal”) spaces, or by having them adopt the fl âneur position that entails absorbing aesthetically the spectacle of everyday urban life (Joyce’s “Wandering Rocks,” European Joyce Studies 12, ed. Andrew Gibson and Steven Morrison (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002), 57–72. In relation to our previous paragraph and the idea of walking, one should also cite Peter I. Barta’s Bely, Joyce and Döblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). Ezra Pound, “Dubliners and Mr. James Joyce,” Egoist 1:14 (July 15, 1914), in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming (London: Routledge, 1997), 67. Arthur Power, From an Old Waterford House (London: n.d.), 63–54 (quoted by Ellmann, JJII 505). Woolf’s development of the experience of exterior urban space, as it eventually turned into Mrs Dalloway, can probably be ascribed to her reading of Ulysses. See Richard Brown’s “Time, Space and the City in ‘Wandering Rocks,’” 60. As Bernard Benstock once radically pronounced, in an article revealingly titled “Ulysses Without Dublin,” “Ulysses is no more about Dublin than Moby Dick is about a whale.” But then he prudently added: “—although no less.” JJQ 10.1 (Fall 1972), 100–101. The sentences just quoted from Ezra Pound’s article are preceded by another paragraph which would be much more unpalatable to today’s readers, and

Introduction

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

17

much more radical in its defense of a supranational aesthetics for high modernism: “It is surprising that Mr. Joyce is Irish. One is so tired of the Irish or ‘Celtic’ imagination (or ‘phantasy’ as I think they now call it) flopping about. Mr. Joyce does not flop about. He defi nes. He is not an institution for the promotion of Irish peasant industries. He accepts an international standard of prose writing and lives up to it.” Robert H. Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1979), 67. Such an international, universal view of the urban experience runs counter to the historical fact, noted by many critics, that modernist activity itself varied greatly depending on cities, as testified by the important migrations of artists from one city to another. See, for example, the chapter on the city in Christopher Butler’s Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 133–208. See also the discussion of modernism as an “international, urban and yet placeless, phenomenon” in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. On the question of Joyce’s nationalism, see Seamus Deane, “Joyce the Irishman,” The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 31–53; Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995); Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, eds., Semi-Colonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On Joyce’s detailed rendering of Dublin, see Terence Brown, “The Dublin of Dubliners,” James Joyce: An International Perspective, ed. Suheil Badi Bushrui and Bernard Benstock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), 11–18; David Pierce, “Dubliners: Topography and Social Class,” James Joyce Ireland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 83–103. See Anne Fogarty’s “Remapping Nationalism: The Politics of Space in Joyce’s Dubliners,” ed. Pascal Bataillard and Dominique Sipière (Paris: Ellipse, 2000), 80–93. The formulation “doblinganger” (FW 490.17) is also a reference to Alfred Döblin, whom Joyce considered his fi rst German disciple; see Ira B. Nadel, Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts (London: Macmillan, 1989), 270. In fact, the allusion to Döblin complements that to the city of Dublin, since it is precisely in his modernist portrayal of a European city that the German writer follows Joyce in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). In his article “Authenticity and Identity: Catching the Irish Spirit,” Vincent Cheng reminds us how perilous it may be to go in search of a picturesque “Irish spirit” in Joyce’s work, when Joyce himself makes a point of deconstructing such stereotypical national categories. Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 240–261. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; rpt. 1960), 69. In “Eternest cittas, heil! A Genetic Approach,” Jean-Michel Rabaté offers a thought-provoking genetic approach to Joyce’s inclusion of other cities’ names in Finnegans Wake; in Joyce and the City, ed. Michael Begnal, 182–198. See particularly Ian Gunn and Clive Hart’s James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004; rpt. Clive Hart and Leo Knuth, 1975) as the best illustration of this approach. Bulson’s article retraces the history of this trend in Joycean criticism, which I therefore will not repeat here.

18 Valérie Bénéjam 24. While composing the stories for Dubliners, Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus that “I would like to have a map of Dublin on my wall. I suppose I am becoming something of a maniac.” Letter to Stanislaus, 6 November 1906, Letters II, 186. 25. Frank Budgen remarks of Joyce’s rendering of Dublin, “Houses and interiors are shown us, but as if we entered them as familiars, not as strangers come to take stock of the occupants and inventory their furniture. Bridges over the Liffey are crossed and recrossed, named and that is all. We go into eatinghouses and drinking bars as if the town were our own and these our customary ports of call.” Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 69–70. 26. Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974). References here are to The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 416–417. The fundamental distinction between conceived and perceived or lived space, which is employed in the article by Anne Fogarty previously mentioned, is also the foundation behind Liam Lanigan’s contribution to this volume. Lefebvre’s concepts generally are remarkably operative in analyzing Joyce’s rendering of space. As Edward Soja explains, drawing from Lefebvre’s distinctions, the aim is to abandon the dualism polarizing spatial thinking around the binary opposition between “fi rstspace” (perceived space, material reality) and “secondspace” (conceived and idealized space, images and representation), and to replace it with “thirdspace” (lived space), or rather with an ontological triad, “the trialectics of spatiality,” which would account for perceived, conceived as well as lived space. See Edward Soja’s “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination,” in Human Geography Today, ed. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre (Cambridge & Oxford: Polity Press & Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 265–268; as well as Soja’s Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, the chapter “The Trialectics of Spatiality” (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 53–82, particularly the diagram, 74. Such refusal of binary logic is of course perfectly in keeping with Joyce’s own frustration with, and criticism of, simplistic dualities. With a similar approach, Doreen Massey’s work may also be related to Joyce’s rendering of the experience of spatiality: “I want to imagine space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity; space as the sphere in which distinct narratives coexist; space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of more than one voice. Without space, multiplicity would be impossible.” Doreen Massey, “Spaces of Politics,” Human Geography Today, 279. 27. Tissu urbain (or urban fabric) and imaginaire urbain (or urban collective imagination) are concepts developed by Henri Lefebvre in Le Droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968). For an English version, see Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, trans. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 28. See Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Reading Joyce’s City: Public Space, Self, and Gender in Dubliners” as well as Shari Benstock “City Spaces and Women’s Places in Joyce’s Dublin,” in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, ed. Bernard Benstock (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988), respectively 282–292 and 293–307. 29. See Anne Fogarty’s analysis of “Eveline” and “Clay” in “Remapping Nationalism: The Politics of Space in Joyce’s Dubliners,” 89–91. 30. See Christine Van Boheemen’s “‘The Language of Flow’: Joyce’s Dispossession of the Feminine in Ulysses,” in Joyce, Modernity and Its Mediation, ed. Christine Van Boheemen (European Joyce Studies 1) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 63–78.

Introduction

19

31. See Catherine Whitley’s “Gender and Interiority” and Deirdre Flynn’s “An Uncomfortable Fit: Joyce’s Women in Dublin and Trieste,” in Joyce and the City, ed. Michael Begnal, respectively 35–50 and 51–64. See also Gerardine Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation (London & New York: Routledge, 2010), particularly the fourth chapter, “Modernism and the Gender of Writing,” 80–120. 32. See Johanna X. K. Garvey, “City Limits: Reading Gender and Urban Spaces in Ulysses,” Twentieth Century Literature 41:1 (Spring 1995), 108–123. Garvey gives a very complete historical overview of feminist critiques of space in literature, including the ideas of Claudine Herrmann and Julia Kristeva. 33. See Daniel Ferrer, “Circe, Regret and Regression,” in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 127–145, and particularly the early analysis of the parallel topographical and typographical openings of the episode. 34. See Roy Gottfried, Joyce’s Iritis and the Iritated Text: The Dis-Lexic Ulysses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995). 35. Starting from a very different perspective, Vike Martina Plock reaches similar conclusions in her recent essay, “Good Vibrations: ‘Sirens,’ Soundscapes, and Physiology,” JJQ 46:3–4, 481–496. 36. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 476. Connecting genetic criticism with urban space, Jean-Michel Rabaté has shown, in his study of the “Haveth Childers Everywhere” episode in Book III of Finnegans Wake, how Joyce’s conveying a dynamic portrayal of the city could be related to the dynamics of language: the city “is not the stable site that can be reconstructed or confi rmed with the help of maps and directories,” but rather “an expanding linguistic site that never bypasses real history . . . but that ‘re-pairs’ it by a system of grafts, duplications, and additions.” Rabaté, “Eternest cittas, heil!: A Genetic Approach,” in Joyce and the City, ed. Michael Begnal, 197. 37. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce (Paris: Hachette, 1993), 5. 38. See Richard Brown, “Time, Space and the City in ‘Wandering Rocks’,” 65–66. 39. See also Michael Groden’s remarkable essay, “Joyce at Work on ‘Cyclops’: Toward a Biography of Ulysses,” JJQ 44:2 (Winter 2007), 217–245, as well as his latest Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010).

1

Space in Finnegans Wake An Archaeology John Bishop

In one of many passages in Joyce’s work explicitly given over to the thematic exploration of “the space question” (FW 160.36)—the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes in Finnegans Wake—the figure of “the Gripes,” or sour grapes, hanging “bolt downright” from a vine-branch and refusing to submit to the Mookse by falling into its gaping mouth (FW 153.10–11), has this to say about his spatial existence: “I connow make my submission, I cannos give you up, the Gripes whimpered . . . My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own. My velicity is too fit in one stockend. And my spetial inexshellsis the belowing things ab ove” (FW 154.31–35). The lines are in part saying simply that the Gripes will not submit to the Mookse—as Ireland and Connaught were forced to submit to England under the terms of the papal bull Laudabiliter (“connow,” “loudy bullocker”), and as the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was forced to submit to Pope Gregory VI at Canossa (“cannos”). Although he has the capacity to “tumble” from “his temple,” and his potential “velocity is two feet in one second,” the Gripes will not fall, but will rather maintain his place, immobilized as if in a pillory (“my felicity is to fit in one stock-end”), dangling up there in his “special, spatial heaven” (“inexshellsis” suggests the Latin in excelsis, “in the highest”), reflecting from above (“ab ove”), as in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the “things below.”1 Two Wakean coinages in this passage—both in the phrase “spetial inexshellsis”—are now going to serve as the springboard of this essay. The fi rst of these terms suggesting infi nite extension (“spatial in excelsis”), and the second suggesting containment and enclosure (“in a shell”), they hold out two complementary conceptions of space that this essay will fi nd at work in Joyce. “Spetial” fi rst: historical linguists trace the word “space” back through the medieval Latin spacium to the Latin spatium, relating it in turn to the verb exspatior (or expatior), meaning “to spread out, extend,” “to wander from the course,” “to expatiate or digress,” as in this passage from the Wake, evoking the re-aggregation of space, toward morning, in the rising consciousness of the dreamer: What was thaas? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth. But really now whenabouts? Expatiate then how much times we live in. Yes? (FW 555.1–4)

Space in Finnegans Wake 21 Apart from implying the inextricable interdependence of space and time as categories (“whenabouts,” “how much times”), the passage suggests that space is “expatiative” and “expatiatory”: it spreads out from wherever it starts and keeps on unfolding; there is no apparent end to it.2 That historical linguists have not traced the Latin words spatium and exspatior back from Latin through prior forms suggests that the terms are relatively modern precipitates of the language; but it is nonetheless tempting to connect them, in the spirit of Joycean “adamelegy” (77.26), to the cluster of words and concepts that spill out of the Indo-European root pet-, which also carries the general sense of “spreading out” and yields such English outgrowths as “paten” and “pan” (things “spread out”), “patent” (“in the open”), “fathom,” “pace,” “pass,” “expand,” “fathom,” and, fi nally, “petal”—the last of many terms designating items that spread and open outward into space. Space, in this conception, is not something completely and intuitively always already there, but something expatiative, expansive, and exfoliating: both culturally and ontogenetically, it seems to open out and unpetal over time. 3 Something of this evolutionary sense of space informs most of Joyce’s fiction. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins in the confi nes of bedroom and family parlor, wanders out across the hall and then outward toward Clongowes Wood, and then continues unfolding, in a series of nesting containments, into an infi nitely extensive universe: Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe (P 15)

The continually amplifying opening of space described in this passage is reflected throughout the novel in the recurrent quasi-Rosicrucian image of Stephen’s life-world as a perpetually unfolding rose (P 172, 218), and is also perhaps carried forth into Ulysses, which begins in comparably confined circumstances (“the omphalos”) and gradually opens outward—unpetals and blooms—into a vision, in “Ithaca,” of stars and galaxies and infinite space. The image of the unpetaling and opening flower, finally, is most fully developed in Finnegans Wake, whose second half, tracing out the slow “opening of the mind to light” (FW 258.31–32), begins with the evocation of a heliotrope turning toward the sun and opening, and recurrently evokes the unpetaling of flowers to suggest the opening of the dreamer’s consciousness to light and the plenum of the world: “Now day, slow day, from delicate to divine, divases. Padma, brighter and sweetster, this flower that bells, it is our

22

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hour of risings . . . Lotus spray. Till herenext. Adya” (FW 598.11–14; see also, for example, 470.13–21, 601.0–20, 602.1–5, 609.11–12, 609.30–32, 613.17–26, 617). Since this passage takes place toward the end of the Wake, as morning dawns in the east, it draws on Eastern languages (“divas” means “day in Sanskrit, “padma” means “lotus,” and “adya” means “today” or “now”)—in part to evoke a Hindu cosmogonic myth, according to which the world and all its appearances unfold from the interior of a lotus blossom implanted in Vishnu’s navel; the opening of this lotus signifies, according to Madame Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, “the emanation of the objective from the concealed.”4 The conception of space immanent in this image and in our speculative etymological treatment of the word—as something that continually and dynamically opens and extends outward, like the interior of an unfurling flower—is one that recurs in Joyce’s writing and whose progressive expansion we will now explore. Where does this unfurling begin? At the core of the flower, no doubt— within the hermetically wrapped enclosure out of which the flower expands (“inexshellsis”). It can only be out of this darkly enshelled ball that the expatiative process of unpetaling and unfolding can happen; or, as Joyce puts it in a description of a flower, a “chlorid cup” (FW 613.26), opening up to light and the world at the end of the Wake, “a spathe of calyptrous glume involucrimines the perinanthean Amenta” (FW 613.17–18). “[A] space of hidden gloom,” in other words (“calyptrous” suggests the Greek kalyptra, “veil,” and kalypto, “to cover, conceal”), is enveloped (Latin involucrum) by the enclosing “spathe,” “calyptra,” “glume,” “involucre,” or “perianth” designated here (these are all botanical terms for the enwrapping sheaths and husks of flowers and plants); but now the occulted core is opening to light (“Amenta” names the Egyptian world of the dead and perhaps also “amentality” or unconsciousness). Beginning with a consideration of this dark core, accordingly, the remainder of this chapter will go on to explore the process of its opening and exfoliation, in the hope of providing a brief overview of “the ouragan of spaces” (FW 504.14 [“spaces” as well as the “species”]) and an account of the ways in which space is represented as opening out into the world in Joyce—“erigenating from next to nothing and [then] celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitiptitoploftical” (FW 4.36–5.2) implies constructedness. The world’s space “erigenat[es] from next to nothing” in this construction—as in the image of the “notyet” existent space locked within the flower—because at the beginning of time, and in the middle of the night, in absolute unconsciousness, space is not there: parts of the Wake, because it is about the night and unconsciousness, take place in what Joyce calls “the no placelike no timelike absolent” (FW 609.2)—in an “absolute absence” void of evident place and time: “Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned” (German wohnet, “dwelled”)—nothing, no place, since “ere wohned” also yields “erewhon,” “nowhere” spelled backward (FW 152.18; more on this citation next).

Space in Finnegans Wake 23 Yet since one form of unconsciousness (the nothingness of dreamless sleep) recalls another (infantile unconsciousness)—“no thing making newthing wealthshowever” in the Wake’s topologies (FW 253.8–9)—this “nowhere” becomes something of a “newwhere,” opening into the ur-spatialities out of which “Haroun Childeric Eggeberth” (FW 4.32 [egg, birth, child]) and a lot of little Finnegans wake and enter the world. In the Freudian account, as at the end of “Ithaca,” sleep entails “intrauterine regression” and so resituates “the manchild in the womb” (U 17.2317–18):5 since in sleep the senses withdraw from the object world and collapse into the interior of a body rocked by circulating waters, its quasi-amniotic spatiality becomes also the spatiality of sleep: “the sleeper turns into himself and falls back into the womb, his own body being the material substratum of the dream-world.”6 Joyce accordingly pulls this space to the fore in Finnegans Wake—and especially in “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (Chapter I.viii, 196–216).7 We enter life and space “formelly confounded with amother” (FW 125.11–12)—as a body “formerly confounded with another,” that is, because “formally co-founded with a mother.” Our fi rst emplacement in the world and space is as a dual unity situated within a body undergoing formation within the body of a mother. Students and thinkers from a range of disciplines and pop-cultural movements—embryology, prenatal psychology, neuropsychology, and even dianetics—have speculated in various ways about the formative persistence into the present of forms of intrauterine experience and memory: as Samuel Beckett put it in the essay on Joyce that he contributed to Our Exagmination, at least, “there is a great deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian” who sleeps, dead to the world, at Finnegans Wake.8 Proprioceptive spatial sense of some biologically wired-in sort must begin in the womb—where, for instance, in the “suctorial reflex,” the late-term fetus “learns” to bring its thumb to its mouth and to suck. Freud ultimately regarded memories of life in the womb as fantasies—projections backward in time of idyllic memories experienced at the breast (“the Nirvana experience”)—though this did not evidently stop Joyce, the “biologist in words” who had already tried to represent the life of the embryo in “Oxen of the Sun” and who went about his imaginative reconstruction of the night playfully, from depicting the Wake’s hero, “Haroun Childeric Eggeberth,” as a being returned to the womb and awaiting, with birth and awakening, the cosmogenesis of space and the world:9 Before he fell hill he fi lled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet, coyly coiled um, cool of her curls: We were but thermites then, wee, wee. Our antheap we sensed as a Hill of Allen, the Barrow for an People, one Jotnursfjaell . . . (FW 57.10–14) Before falling into the gravity-bound travail of life (“before he fell hill”), this being fi lled a heaven suffused by circulating feminine waters (“heaven: a stream, alplapping”); though really the size of an “antheap,” it seemed a

24

John Bishop

“giant’s mountain” (Danish Jotnursfjaell”), a huge “Hill of Allen” (headquarters of Finn McCool). And though the “he” depicted here is but the size of a “termite”—very “wee”—he’s charged with the potential of explosive growth (“thermite” is an explosive): “(gracious helpings, at this rate of growing our cotted child of yestereve will soon fill space and burst in systems, so speeds the instant!)” (FW 429.11–13). Finnegans Wake begins and ends with evocations of the “alplapping streamlet” and amniotic spatiality treated in these passages—starting with the “riverrun,” “swerve of shore,” and “bend of bay” of its opening paragraph and ending with the flow of the river Liffey (Irish Life) in its last. This quasi-amniotic spatiality is the matrix out of which more evolved forms of space unfold in Finnegans Wake, and, references to ALP being ubiquitous, it forms a kind of background to everything else in the book.10 In one line of speculation, we never fully leave this space, even in conscious waking life since water “constitut[es] 90% of the human body” and circulates within it continually (U 17.226–227), and since everything that we see and sense reaches us by way of the watery conduits of the optic and sensory nerves: as a primordial fact of embodiment, we continue to live somewhere within and under water.11 Pre- or postnatally, the mother’s body is the matrix out of which more evolved forms of space and spatial relations arise in Finnegans Wake: “We’re all found of our anmal matter,” as a footnote in the children’sprimer section of the book remarks (FW 294.F5)—“fond” of the “fostering mother” (alma mater) within whom our “animal matter” was “found.” The French psychoanalytic feminist Julia Kristeva has famously compared this maternal ground to Plato’s chora (variously translated as “receptacle,” “space,” “room”), the pregiven “space-before-space,” halfway between myth and philosophical category, out of which actual space and matter are understood to arise at the beginning of cosmogonic time—and all the more especially because Plato genders chora female in the Timaeus, referring to it as “the Receptacle,” “the ‘nurse’ of all Becoming,” and the “matrix” (“matrix,” Latin for “womb,” derives from the Indo-European root māter-, together with the conceptually related terms “mother,” mater, “matter,” and “material”):12 “All walking, or wandering,” according to this history, is from mother, to mother, in mother: it gets us nowhere. Movement is in space; and space (χώρα), as Plato says in the Timaeus, is a receptacle, a vessel (ϖοδοχ—“undertaker”); a matrix (κµαγειον); as it were the mother (µήτηρ) or nurse (τιθήνη), of all becoming. Space is a sphere or spheres containing us; ambient and embracing; the world-mothering air as atmosphere.13 Joyce, too—pairing “Father Times and Mother Spacies” (FW 600.2–3)— figures the ground of space (and the species) as female and maternal. In the psychoanalytic account of development, relations with the mother through whom we enter and orient ourselves in materiality determine lifelong

Space in Finnegans Wake 25 relations with matter itself—in operations like nutrition and self-care, and in modes of attachment and separation, dependence and independence, and general life-tone. Kristeva has argued, in a related speculation, that liminal prelinguistic exchanges between mother and child in choric space—in play, singsong, babytalk, nonsense—exert an unconsciously formative force on language, disrupting its normal functions and potentiating poetic expression in ways reflected in the language of Finnegans Wake—as here:14 “Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse” (FW 152.18–19). Out of the nothingness that we considered earlier, an object now appears—“a Mookse”— and with it, along the way, the milky “moocow” of the fi rst page of A Portrait (“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow”), the semiotic fairy-tale rhythm that conveyed it, and the already obliviated mother who was its source. Rough mappings of the processes by which senses of object-space and geometric form emerge in infantile unconsciousness and in relations with a mother have been provided in a range of explanatory accounts deriving from psychoanalysis (particularly in the field of “object-relations”), Piagetian “genetic epistemology,” and child psychology generally (in the Timaeus, space and matter take form when a masculine Demiurge begins geometricizing the chora).15 The separation of the infant’s body from its mother’s seems to begin in these accounts, as in Joyce, with the “in-forming” instillation of language “in the far ear” (FW 23.22–23)—where the elision of “ear” and “east” suggests that orientation in the world, and vision, arise through the hearing of language, as on the fi rst page of A Portrait (“once upon a time,” “his father told him that story”). Language acquisition in turn has the triple effect of instilling in the child the laws of culture; of eliciting vision and making indexically apparent the extended space that will be explored in the child’s engagement with his environment; and also, crucially—as in Vico and Freud—of drawing the spatiality of the human body out of its unconscious amorphousness: —Recount! —I have it here to my fingall’s ends. This liggy piggy wanted to go to the jampot. And this leggy peggy spelt pea. (FW 496.17–19)

As these lines recollective both of children’s games and Kristeva’s semiotic imply, learning where one’s digits and hands lie in space (and that one has them) is critical to more advanced undertakings, like getting things, eating, going to the bathroom, and writing (“spelled ‘p’ ”). Another paradigmatic example in the Wake of the repressive and world-building process by which eye and mind are trained, with the infant body, to see and organize external space occurs in Joyce’s parodic revision of Euclid’s First Theorem (on the construction of the equilateral triangle) in the “Lessons” chapter of the book (II.ii, 293.1–300.8). Here, while recalling how children learn to construct and perceive geometric space (“the evolution of drawing is inseparable from

26

John Bishop

the whole structuration of space”),16 he foregrounds the repressive counterprocess by which maternal spatiality—“the whome of your eternal geomater” (FW 296.31–297.1 [“womb,” “home,” “mater”])—is displaced and supplanted by these forms; and in doing so, perhaps—by suggesting that properties like “closeness” and “distance” weren’t and aren’t always and inevitably metric, but affective, too—he helps lay out an “intimate geometry” comparable to that explored by Gaston Bachelard in his “topoanalytic” treatment of the poetic image and “inner space.”17 The acculturating body itself—treated generally in modern thought as a perceptual “null-point” from whose observational center space externally extends—has in fact complex internal spatialities of its own: “[T]here are . . . several heterogeneous spaces all centered on the child’s own body—buccal, tactile, visual, auditory, and postural spaces— . . . but without objective coordination. These different spaces are then gradually coordinated (buccal and tactile-kinesthetic, through sucking objects, for instance).18 Since the evolved modality through which most adults think about space is predominantly visual (“Proteus,” U 3.1–20), and since eye-disease impaired Joyce’s ability to see, he was acutely aware of the nonvisual components of space— and perhaps most acutely, as other essays in this volume demonstrate, of its kinesthetic and auditory dimensions (but also olfactory: U 13.1007–1033). Through the greater part of the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses, Bloom apprehends events taking place in the barroom of the Ormond Hotel largely through his ears, without seeing, while eavesdropping from behind a closed door; this is surely one origin of the character of “Earwicker” in Finnegans Wake, who drifts throughout the night vision-void and unconscious, yet with ever-open ears taking perpetually vigilant bearings on the dark:19 “he would evesdrip, were it mous at hand” (FW 23.21–22); “he eavesdrops,” in other words, on sounds as barely audible as those of dripping eaves-water, scurrying mice (“mous”), or the “alplapping streamlet” of the bloodstream (“evesdrip” also names “Eve,” first mother). Earwicker’s ears are capable of perceiving not only real events in external reality (the sound of traffic and delivery trucks in the morning, for instance [FW 604.12–18]), but also the unconscious spatialities of his own body—as for instance when, after a paragraph consisting primarily of twenty-eight words for “death” and phrases from the Catholic Mass for the Dead (FW 499.4–12), a voice is heard saying: “—But there’s leps of flam in Funnycoon’s Wick. The keyn has passed. Lung lift the keying” (FW 499.13–14). The sonorous “keening” and kinesthetic “lifting” of the “lung” here tell us that the figure being portrayed as unconscious and dead to the world is not really dead at all, but simply not awake, “pending a rouseruction of his bogey” (FW 499.1 [that “eruction” is another kinesthetic sign of interior space and vitality]): the king’s spark has not been extinguished (“leap,” “flam,” “wick”), and he has not died (“long live the king!”) but will wake up again like Tim Finnegan (“there’s lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake”). Evocations of this kind—of auditory, kinesthetic, and other subliminal spatialities—recur everywhere throughout the Wake.

Space in Finnegans Wake 27 Some of the most archaic features of constructed space are associated, in Finnegans Wake, with the odd composite figure of “Mamalujo.” Growing out of the term “mama,” perhaps—and so suggesting the overwriting and alteration of maternal space by culture—the name is a contraction of “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John” and refers to Four Old Men who reappear throughout the Wake, recalling the four evangelists and, as “our herodotary Mammon Lujius” (FW 13.20), the four “Herodotus”-like historians who wrote the Irish Annals of the Four Masters. The Four Old Men are associated as well with senators and justices and the law (e.g., FW 92.35–93.1, 474.21, 475.18–476.28); with the little prayer known as the White Paternoster (“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,/ Bless the bed that I lie on” [FW 598.22–23]); and also, conforming to this rectangularity, with all kinds of spatial tetrads, including the four provinces of Ireland, its four waves, the four cardinal points of the compass, and four roads leading in four different directions but at least at one point crossing (FW 372.34– 373.7, 475.3–7, and III.iii generally): the siglum that Joyce used to designate the Four—Χ—is described in the Wake as “a multiplication marking for crossroads ahead” (FW 119.28–29; cf. 299.F4). These figures suggest not only orthogony and quadrature (and the demiurgic mathematicization of space), but also the quadrilinearity of the page itself (the Four Old Men, once again, bear textual history, law, and Word), and so the space of writing and inscription, culture and building. It is important, therefore, that the Four are not simply four, but also old and men, since they are there from the beginning of time (II.iv), always already, as manifestations of patriarchy. Early in the Wake, in a passage where they restrain the stirring body of a wakening Finnegan and persuade him to stay in bed (FW 24.16–29.36), they tell him, “you’re better off, sir, where you are, primesigned in the full of your dress, bloodeagle waistcoat and all, remembering your shapes and sizes on the pillow of your babycurls” (FW 24.28–30). The verb “primesign,” according to the OED, means “to mark (a person) with the sign of the cross before baptism” and so suggests here the earliest inscriptive marking of culture on the infant body (as the making of the sign of the cross suggests its quadrature, and as those “shapes and sizes,” evoking geometric forms and measurable volumes, suggest the rudiments of spatial formation in the infant mind). Beckett speaks cryptically, in his essay in Our Exagmination, of “the Four speaking through the child’s brain”—having in mind less this particular passage, perhaps, than the lengthier sequences dealing with Mamalujo and Shaun in II.iv and III.iii. 20 The association of Mamalujo with orthogony, with the number four, and with the cardinal points of the compass raises the interesting questions—already voiced by Beckett, again, in Our Exagmination—of why we live spatially in “quarters” (rather than in “thirds” or “fifths,” say), and why the space we live in is structured as it is.21 Why are there three dimensions and four directional points of the compass? Kant, in an early essay, suggested that “God could have chosen a different law as the basis

28 John Bishop for dimensionality and that had He done so, other kinds of space would have arisen: the world would then possess ‘an extension with other properties and dimensions.’”22 Yet in another early essay, written prior to his volatilization of space into a purely transcendental intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason, he proposed that dimensionality and directionality are projected effects of embodiment. For the body provid[es] things with a directionality they would lack when considered merely as occupying positions relative to each other . . . material entities would be unoriented, lacking the defi nite directionality of “right” and “left,” “up” and “down,” “front” and “back.” These paired terms, taken together, describe the three dimensions of space: the dimensionality of space follows from the directionality of the body.23 The asymmetrical and “incongruent” “handedness” of the body further inflects and complicates these differentiations, enabling us “to understand analogously [incongruent] counterparts in external perception and, more momentously, to grasp the spatial world as oriented in certain directions. But this means that the true basis of directionality is not absolute space but our own orienting/oriented body regarded as (in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase) ‘the absolute source.’”24 Joyce, too, suggests that abstract spatial dimensionality is an emanation of the body when he portrays his sleeping hero, a kabbalistic Ainsoph, lying there, “Length Withought Breath, of him, a chump of the evums” (FW 261.13–14, 23; cf. 475.3–7; emphasis mine). Drifting through the “evening” as if through eternity (Latin aevum) because unconscious and dead to the world (“chump,” “without thought”), this model being (“champ”) intrinsically embodies dimensionality (while the kinesthetically lifting lungs and “breath,” as here, tell us that he is not at his wake, but simply not awake). The “triaxial dimensionality” of the body and its projective structuration of space will help account for the origins of spatial “quarters” and the proto-regions designated by the four cardinal points of the compass— though only after raising the further and fundamental questions, debated among spatial theorists, as to whether perceived space is innate or constructed, empirical and real (“out there”) or transcendental and ideal (“in here”), absolute (one vast empty extent) or relative. Most thinkers pursue a middle course through these considerations. Casey suggests—in a line of thought altogether consonant with the Wake’s portrayal of a “solarsystemised” universe centered on “one . . . original sun” (FW 263.24–27)—that the axis differentiating “up” from “down” is yet further divided at the horizon (from the Greek horos, “boundary,” “limit”): “[T]he experienced horizon is a central creative force in the field of visual perception, especially when beheld at the beginning or the ending of the day”; it is “that factor in everyday perception that embodies the cosmogonic separation of Earth from Sky.”25 The co-alignment of the directions “ahead” and “behind”

Space in Finnegans Wake 29 with the points on the horizon of sunrise and sunset—the “gates” through which, in primitive myth, the sun enters and leaves the world—would then enable the partitioning of the world into east and west, and further, along a “left–right” axis, into north and south; the observer of these pointings and this quartering, furthermore, would be able to think of himself emplaced at the spherical center of “six dimensions.”26 Over time, this primitively geometricized field of operations, within which the concrete activities of walking and living take place, becomes abstracted and internalized, ultimately to give rise to the Cartesian grid and the evolved and modern notion of space as intrinsically three-dimensional, isomorphic, immaterial, ideal, and infi nite in extension. The Four Old Men and the culturally inherited, pregiven, “herodotary” spatialities they represent are associated throughout Finnegans Wake with Shaun the Post, and Shaun in turn is figured as a “spatialist”—indeed, an “eminent” “spatialist” (FW 149.18–19), frequently given to lecturing about and “making spaces in his psyche” (FW 416.5–6; 415.28; 417.25); if “the dream is . . . an attempt,” libidinally impelled, “to establish contact with the environment [and] to rebuild the world” out of the night’s “vacants of space” (FW 143.5–6), Shaun may be the intrapsychic agent who enables this imaginary spatial building, within a field culturally prescribed by the Four. 27 In chapter II.iv, the Four voyeuristically observe Shaun—playing Tristan to Issy’s Isolde—crossing a diffuse Irish Sea and moving toward terra fi rma. And in III.iii, they converge from their four separate quarters to meet at a crossroads where Shaun lies, a “crossroads puzzler” fi lling space, and to conduct an inquest or “starchamber quiry” over his unconscious body (FW 475.3–4, 18–19): this crossing would be an extended form of “primesigning,” and it results in Shaun’s slow growth over III.iii from a “wee bairn” lying unconscious in his “cubical crib” (FW 477.3, 476.32) into the image of his blustering father, HCE, at home in the full-blown and recognizably modern city (in “Haveth Childers Everywhere,” FW 532.6–554.10). This movement suggests the slow re-aggregation and coalescence, as the chapter and book move toward morning, of consciousness and modern spatiality in the dreamer’s sleeping brain. And this sense is reinforced by Shaun’s name and role as “Shaun the Post,” since as “a postman traveling backwards in the night,” he does what all of us do in sleep: he carries letters, in his head and on the tip of his tongue, and is prepared to deliver them when he gets back to the place he left, by waking up in the morning.28 While other characters in Finnegans Wake occasionally speak in the fi rst person, moreover, Shaun (with his sister Issy) is the only one who does so consistently and regularly, suggesting an essential link between himself, the expressive word “I” (Latin ego), and so the dreamer’s rising ego-functioning and consciousness; hence Shaun’s role as moralizing agent (III.ii) and censorious guardian of the dream (II.i). This characterization is further complicated by Shaun’s inextricable involvement with his sister Issy, the other regular fi rst-person speaker in the Wake, who

30

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dreams about and dwells on Shaun throughout the book—as her “Gaelic champion, the onliest one of her choice, her bleaueyedeal of a girl’s friend” (FW 384.23–24)—while gazing at herself and her reflection, an imaginary playmate, in a mirror (e.g., at 157.18, 24); her imbrication in Shaun (the subject here of her thought) is further suggested by the siglum that Joyce used to designate her in his notebooks and the Wake: the letter “T”—for “Tristan,” rather than “Isolde”—lying on its side (“a tea . . . for . . . tryst” [FW 119.30; cf. 299.F4, 486.14–29]). Issy’s mirror-gazing and concern with “looks” suggest the attainment of a visually and spatially unified sense of the body of the kind discussed by Lacan in his essay on “the mirror stage,” as well as the evolved capacities for “reflection,” “speculation,” and object-choice; and it also “rhymes” with the unoffi cial title that Joyce gave to the four chapters of Book III (“the four watches of Shaun”)—where “watch” suggests vigilance, “watching,” and vision (Shaun also, “making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass [FW 415.28], is associated with the mirror). A synthesis of all these aggregating figures and relations suggests that within the ever-unfolding series of self-enclosing spatial matrices that we have been exploring, Shaun moves us further outward, from a consideration of forms of unconscious space into an exploration of the consciously perceived dimensions of the real, modern, middle-class world and the production of its social space. It is no accident that so much of Book III, more than other parts of the Wake, evokes with Shaun and Issy the middle-class spatialities of the school, the parlor, the church, the bedroom, the street, and the city: “where the bus stops, there shop I” (FW 540.15–16). In Edmund Wilson’s view, the last chapter of Book III gives the clearest picture in the entire book of the realworld circumstances of the Wake’s dreamer. 29 Two of the set-pieces given over to considerations of space in Finnegans Wake—the paired fables of “the Mookse and the Gripes” and “the Ondt and the Gracehoper”—help illuminate further Shaun’s and the lettered ego’s imbrication in space-making. In the fi rst of these, a revision of Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Grapes delivered in the middle of a lecture on “the space question” (FW 160.36), Shaun assumes the role of the rapacious fox (or “Mookse”) who runs across a bunch of grapes (or “Gripes,” i.e., sour grapes) hanging unreachably high above him “in all his specious heavings” (FW 153.17 [“in all his spacious heavens]); the two stand at an impasse at the extremity of the world until they are both dissolved and washed away by ALP. A number of associations ensue: Shaun (“the Mookse,” and “a spatialist”) is also understood to be an avatar of Space and imperial outreach, and so speaks for Rome, the Roman Catholic Church and, in the particular figure of Pope Adrian IV (the only English pope in history), imperial England (in the papal bull Laudabiliter [FW 154.22, 33–34] Adrian granted Ireland to Henry II); Shem, by contrast (“the Gripes,” and a “temporiser” [FW 154.26]), is understood to be an avatar of Time and defeat, and reflects Greece and Eastern Europe,

Space in Finnegans Wake 31 the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Ireland—Europe’s spatial extremities. The fable begins with phrasing that we have already examined, its terms evoking both the unconsciousness and infantile regression of sleep (“nowhere,” “moocow”), but it then goes on to suggest how space might exfoliate out of the realm of fi rst and partial objects: “Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse. The onesomeness wast alltolonely, archunsitslike, broady oval, and a Mookse he would a walking go (My hood! cries Antony Romeo)” (FW 152.18–21). The echo of a nursery rhyme and its refrain (“A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go,” “Heigh ho, says Anthony Rowley”), like the echo of the fi rst sentence of A Portrait, is important here because it again recalls infancy and, in context, the kinds of kinesthetic spatial outreach—“walking” an evolved form—that reveal and open up the raw worldly places out of which more abstracted senses of space evolve. The “walking” that begins in this passage goes on and on as the Mookse “step[s] out of his immobile De Rure Albo [“white country,” Albion, England] . . . and set[s] off from Ludstown a spasso” (FW 152.25–29 [It. a spasso, “(to go) for a walk]): “He had not walked over a pentiadpair of parsecs from his azylium when at the turning of the Shinshone Lanteran near Saint-Bowery’s-without-his-Walls he came . . . upon the most unconsciously boggylooking stream he ever locked his eyes with” (FW 152.35– 153.04). Since a “parsec” (a coinage derived from [par]allax and [sec] ond) is “a unit of astronomical length based on the distance from earth at which stellar parallax is one second of arc and equal to 3.258 light years or 1.918 X 1013 miles” (American Heritage Dictionary), the Mookse has walked very far indeed—perhaps to the outer, Archytian edge of space, outside of all boundaries and walls, since “Shinshone Lanteran” evokes not only the cathedral of “St. John Lateran” in the Vatican, but also, as at 155.23–26, the celestial sphere and stars (“shining,” “lantern”). The Mookse’s walking, in short, opens up and articulates space in ways felt immanently in the potential etymological links between the words “space,” “pace,” and “pass,” and in ways also emphasized by Husserl and later his heirs: Husserl singles out the experience of walking as illuminating the mystery of how I build up a coherent core-world out of the fragmentary appearances that, taken in isolated groupings, would be merely kaleidoscopic . . . But this does not happen by a simple survey of these appearances . . . What walking introduces is the fact that I must first of all unify myself before I unify my environs . . . Walking brings home to me that I am a “total organism, articulated into [particular] organs.” . . . The unity of these body parts is supplied precisely by the kinesthetic feelings systematically associated with the actual movements of the body as it walks. . . . organic self-unification is the condition of the unification of the surrounding world.30

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The Mookse’s/Shaun’s walking, moreover, leads to the laying down of paths and roads (another connection of Shaun and the Four), which further articulate the world and moreover entail the transformation of space: “But All-mookse must to Moodend much as Allrouts, austereways or wastersways, in roaming run through Room. Hic sor a stone, singularly illud, and on hoc stone Seter satt huc sate” (FW 153.21–24). If “all roads lead to Rome,” they also carve out and map space in getting there (“Room,” German Raum, “space”); and space, like the Mookse, is all-consuming. In coordinating the Mookse’s ravenous travels with the spread of the Roman empire and the Roman Catholic Church, Joyce may well be calling attention—like Casey, in his study—to the cultural transformation by which classical, Aristotelian conceptions of qualitatively distinct, concrete, and contained “place”—“A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place” (FW 306.17–18)—gave way to the newly ascendant notion of “space” as absolute and infi nite, homogeneous and unitary, regular and striated, isotropic and isometric: it is within this process, coincident with the universalizing spread of neo-Platonism, Christianity, and Roman rule, that the new word and concept of spatium seems to appear in Latin (Joyce cites, at 153.29, Giordano Bruno’s Il Spaccio di Bestia Trionfante, a work in which, in reaction to scholasticism, he helped pioneer the idea of an infi nite universe and infi nite space). By the time of Kant, who makes this space transcendental and internally intuited, “we can represent to ourselves only one space; and if we speak of diverse spaces, we mean thereby only parts of one and the same unique space.”31 For Casey, moreover, the world-engulfi ng spread of Rome—and of Western Europe during the age of exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—entailed the gradual ascendancy of the universe over the cosmos. “Uni-verse,” universum in its original Latin form, means turning around one totalized whole. The universe is the passionate single aim of Roman conquest, Christian conversion, early modern physics, and Kantian epistemology. In contrast, “cosmos” implies the particularity of place; taken as a collective term, it signifies the ingrediency of places in discrete place-worlds. (The Greek language has no word for ‘universe’; instead, it speaks of to pan, “all that is,” “the All.”). In its aesthetic being—“cosmetic” and “cosmic” are second cousins linguistically via the sharing of aisthēsis, that is, bodily sensing—cosmos brings with it an essential reference to the experiencing body which is in close touch with it, takes it in, and comes to know it . . . 32 As the Mookse, then, Shaun brings us toward modern spatial reality—and not just through the acts of walking and roaming, but through building and writing the crafting of space as well: “[M]y building space in lyonine city is always to let to leonlike Men” (FW 155.6–7). The walking and world-building that Shaun begins in the fable of “the Mookse and the

Space in Finnegans Wake 33 Gripes,” moreover, continues through Book III, where Shaun goes on a “postoomany missive” and “long last journey” that carries him, “in the miraculous meddle of this expending umniverse,” through and toward the apparitions of the modern world (FW 408.13–14; 431.27; 410.16–17 [a “postal mission”—though a “posthumous” one because the person carrying all those “too many” letters in his head is also dead to the world; “expending” because space “expands” with the building of dream-scenes, but only in the absence of “expended” space itself]). It is through Shaun, fi nally—who becomes HCE and enters the modern city at the end of III. iii, and who is called our “concelebrated meednight sunflower, piopadey boy, . . . solase in dorckaness” (FW 470. 6–7 [“Peep of Day Boy” suggests the “peep of day,” and that heliotropical “sunflower” turns toward the sun, or “sol”])—that the spatialities of the Wake fully unpetal and open to the light of consciousness at the end of the book and in the morning. Shaun is figured late in the book, in a resurrection hymn chanted by Issy and the rainbow girls, as “Oasis, newleavos spaciosing encampness!” (FW 470.20), or Quasi oliva speciosa in campis (“like a splendid olive tree in the fields”)—its “new leaves” opening up to ever-unfolding space and extension (“encampness”). Shaun’s antagonist in the fable of “the Mookse and the Gripes” would be the Shem-like “Gripes,” whose chief activity, rather than spatial conquest, is a version of what is called simply in current American slang “hanging”—“hanging out,” that is, or idling, or “vegetating,” as grapes are wont to do (and where “vegetating,” since sleep is a “vegetative state,” should be understood in its radical sense, as a derivative of the same IndoEuropean root, weg–ˆ [to stir, to be strong], as the cognate terms “vigil,” “wake,” “waken,” “watch,” and “wait”). The Gripes’ business is simply immobile “waiting,” then (“my velicity is too fit in one stockend” [FW 154.34])—“awaiting” the fullness of his times in one fi xed place, rather than moving outward in space. Hanging from a branch on the opposite side from the Mookse of an “unconsciously boggylooking stream” that “smelt of brown” (FW 153.3, 5 [“bog” suggests Ireland]), the Gripes is figured as the antithesis of the imperial Roman and British Mookse—as a “relentless foe to social and business succes” (FW 156.35–36), a temperamental Irishman given to idle hanging and daydreaming, drinking (“his whine having gone to his palpruy head” [FW 154.14–15], “had he not been having the juice of his times? [FW 153.12]), listening to music (FW 153.5–8), and generally deteriorating (“he was fit to be dried” and “nigh to a pickle” [FW 153.11, 19]): “[H]is polps were charging odours every older minute; he was quickly for getting the dresser’s desdaign on the flyleaf of his frons” (FW 153.13–15). He is, in short, a figure who evokes the immobilizing, dream-inducing, and anarchic powers of the night—not least because the wine that issues from those grapes has the power to intoxicate and black out: “My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don’t I love thee” (FW 153.7–8 [note the “down” and the “dream”]). Set to the rhythm of the song

34

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“Little Brown Jug” (“Ha, ha, ha, you and me,/ Little brown jug, don’t I love thee”), the words and lilt return us to the idea of Kristeva’s semiotic maternal space and the figure of Anna Livia—“Amnis Limina Permanent” (FW 153.2 [“the bound of the river remain”])—in whose fluid spatiality the fable dissolves as the Mookse and Gripes turn into stone and tree and disappear: “But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!” (FW 159.16–18). This reference to the Wake’s “alplapping streamlet” brings us, “by a commodious vicus of recirculation,” back full circle to the beginning of this essay, and to an end of this tour of space in Finnegans Wake: “It was allso agreenable in our sinegear clutchless, touring the no placelike no timelike absolent” (FW 609.1–2 [“sinegear” suggests gearlessness, but also “sinecure,” from the Latin sine cura, “without a care”]). “Did speece permit” (FW 616.27) we might explore further; but space, the topic of this essay, forbids its further exploration here. In 1933, late into the composition of work in progress and at the height of his eye problems, Joyce was faced with the prospect of an operation that might have blinded his right eye. A remark he made at that time to Louis Gillet on the possibility of going blind is telling: “What the eyes bring is nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create, I am losing only one of them” (JJII 664). This chapter hopes to have brought a few of those worlds to light, by making things unconscious conscious and calling attention to a few of the many kinds of space we inhabit that are kept out of mind by the dominance of vision and visual space; and it hopes in the process of having done so to have demonstrated in turn how interesting Finnegans Wake, like Ulysses before it, can make the world.

NOTES 1. “The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes” (FW 263.21–22). On the Emerald Tables of Hermes, a list of principles thought basic to the alchemical practice of transmuting lower into higher forms of matter, see James Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974; rpt. 1959), 46. 2. A conundrum attributed to the neo-Platonist Archytus of Tarentum nicely captures the problem of where space ends: “If I came to be at the edge, for example at the heaven of the fi xed stars, could I stretch my hand or my staff outside, or not? That I should not stretch it out would be absurd (atopos), but if I do stretch it out, what is outside will be either body or place . . . If it is always something different into which the staff is stretched, it will clearly be something infi nite.” Quoted from Eudemus in Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 101. My essay is indebted to Casey’s magisterial work for many of its insights and terms. 3. Foucault, of course, has long asked us to think about space and its disposition as historically variable: “[T]he space which today appears to form

Space in Finnegans Wake 35

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics (Spring 1986), 24; quoted in Casey, The Fate of Place, 461n.76. Vico also treats space as a historical variable, in the section of The New Science entitled “Poetic Geography.” See Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 285–292 (Book II, Section XI, Chapter 1, ¶¶ 741–769). See Roland McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 598. “From time to time we withdraw into the premundane state, into existence in the womb. At any rate, we arrange conditions for ourselves very like what they were then: warm, dark and free from stimuli. Some of us roll ourselves up into a tight package and, so as to sleep, take up a posture much as it was in the womb. The world, it seems, does not possess even those of us who are adults completely, but only up to two thirds; one third of us is still quite unborn.” Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 88. Cf. Freud in “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams”: “Sleep is a reactivation of the intrauterine situation. We have rest, warmth, and absence of stimuli, many people even sleep in the foetal position” (quoted in Geza Roheim, The Gates of the Dream [New York: International University Press, 1969; rpt. 1952]), 1. And cf. Roheim, 116: “In sleep we return to the intrauterine situation. . . . The dream space is both the mother’s womb and the dreamer’s body.” Roheim, The Gates of the Dream, 7. For further discussion of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” and its spatialities, see John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 336–385. I am resorting to self-citation in order to avoid repeating myself more than I already may be. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” in Our Exagmination Round His Factifi cation for Incamination of Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, 1962; rpt. 1939), 8. “biologist in words”: Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” 19. In this it would perhaps resemble Bertram D. Lewin’s “dream screen”— “the surface on which a dream appears to be projected. It is the blank background, present in the dream though not necessarily seen, and the visually perceived action of ordinary manifest dream contents takes place on it or before it.” Bertram D. Lewin, “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15:4 (1949), 419–434; 420. Lewin derives the “dream screen” from unconsciously recalled memories of blissful union with the mother. For the last word on this topic, see Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1938). Also “metro-polis” (mother-city). On chora, see Casey, The Fate of Place, 32–42; Julia Kristeva, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 93–98; Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995), 112–117; and Jacques Derrida, “Khōra,” trans. I. McLeod, in Derrida, On the Name, ed. T. Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–127. Joyce is doing something comparable to Kristeva in passages like the one about the “alplapping streamlet” cited previously, where—as elsewhere in the Wake (“The Mime

36

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

John Bishop of Mick, Nick and the Maggies,” for instance)—he, too, shows a fascination with pregenesiacal forms of space. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), 50. “Among the capitalist mode of production’s numerous signifying practices, only certain literary texts of the avant-garde (Mallarmé, Joyce) manage to cover the infi nity of the [signifying] process, that is, reach the semiotic chora, which modifies linguistic structures.” Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, 122. For a brief account of genetic epistemology and its affi nities with objectrelations theory, see Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 13–17, 63–68. In Piaget’s theory, the child acquires its sense of space in an ordered sequence, fi rst learning to recognize permanent affective objects outside of itself (mother, for example) and then developing senses of topological, projective, and metric geometries. On the distinctions, see 66n11; and Casey, The Fate of Place, 463n96. Piaget and Inhelder, The Pyschology of the Child, 68 n12. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964), 218. Bachelard, whose work, like Joyce’s, is inflected by Freud, is interested in analyzing the ways in which primordially intimate places— one’s fi rst house or bedroom, for instance—affectively understructure one’s general perception of space. Piaget and Inhelder, The Pyschology of the Child, 15–16. The name “Earwicker” derives from the Anglo-Saxon Euerwaaar (“Everwaker”) and means “watchman.” Joyce discovered the name, ready-made to fit the kind of auditory percipient he had already portrayed in “Sirens,” in a cemetery, while on vacation in Bognor, England, in 1923. For further discussion of “Earwicker” and acoustic/phonetic space, see Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 273–286 and context. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” 21. In his discussion of Dante’s and Joyce’s numerologies in Our Exagmination, Beckett wonders: “Why, Mr. Joyce seems to say, should there be four legs to a table, and four to a horse, and four seasons and four Gospels and four Provinces in Ireland? . . . He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he will tell you, and in the meantime must be content to know why horses have not five legs, nor three. He is conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend toward a very significant interrelationship. This preoccupation is freely translated in his present work: see the ‘Question and Answer’ chapter, and the Four speaking through the child’s brain. They are the four winds as much as the four Provinces, and the four Episcopal Sees as much as either.” Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” 21. Immanuel Kant, “Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, and Criticism of the Proofs Propounded by Herr von Leibniz and Other Mechanists in their Treatment of this Controversial Subject, together with Some Introductory Remarks Bearing upon Force in Bodies in General,” trans. J. Handyside, ed., Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space (Chicago: Open Court, 1929), 12; quoted in Casey, The Fate of Place, 188. Casey, The Fate of Place, 205, in a discussion of Kant’s “Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space,” trans. D. Walford and R. Meerbote, in Kant: Theoretical Philosophy: 1755–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Casey, The Fate of Place, 206. For further discussion of the body’s role in grounding dimensionality, see also 118–119 and 205–210.

Space in Finnegans Wake 37 25. Casey, The Fate of Place, 11; he goes on to add that “the strange power of the horizon to distinguish these two regions from each other in the course of daily existence . . . is the dynamic basis of the gap between Heaven and Earth.” See also 25–27 and 63. 26. “Six dimensions” is from Book IV of Aristotle’s Physics (208b12–22): “These are the parts and kinds of place: above, below, and the rest of the six dimensions” (the others are “right, left” and “ahead and behind”); quoted in Casey, The Fate of Place, 53. 27. Roheim, The Gates of the Dream, 116. Would this mean also that the ass that is dragged along by the Four Old Men (at their quincuncial center?), is really an ur-version of Shaun? Shaun is, after all “the fi ne frank fairhaired fellow of the fairytales” (FW 220.12–13), “that mothersmothered model” (FW 191.25) who has submitted to Christ-like self-sacrifice, assumed the male harness, and taken on the burdens and “toils of domestication” (FW 539.34). He is also the only character in the book to be momentarily identified with the ass, at the beginning of “the Four Watches of Shaun” (Book III), where the ass seems to narrate him (FW 405.4–11). 28. “Shawn . . . is a description of a postman travelling backwards in the night through the events already narrated” (Letters I 214) 29. Edmund Wilson, “The Dream of H. C. Earwicker,” in Seon Givens, ed., James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1963), 319. It is in parts of the book like these, too, that one might most profitably apply the kind of analysis—of social space—advanced in works like Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991). 30. Casey, The Fate of Place, 224–225, quoting Edmund Husserl, “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism,” trans. F. A. Elliston and Lenore Langsdorf, in F. A. Elliston and P. McCormick, eds., Husserl: Shorter Works (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 249. In the companion fable of “the Ondt and the Gracehoper,” to tie up a loose end, the event parallel to the Mookse’s walking seems to be the kinesthetic experience of coughing, which would bring about somatic self-organization of a different kind, bearing on the body’s interior self-collection and connectedness (the fable begins with a one-hundred-lettered “thunderword” composed of terms for “cough” and “coughing” [FW 414.19–20]). 31. Casey, The Fate of Place, 193, quoting Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1960), A25 B39, 69. 32. Casey, The Fate of Place, 78; he adds, “The universe is mapped in physics and projected in theology: it is the transcendent geography of infi nite space. The cosmos is sensed in concrete landscapes as lived, remembered, or painted: it is the immanent scene of fi nite place as felt by an equally fi nite body.” See also 122, 201, and 199: “The cosmos itself, formerly a matrix of places, has yielded to the spatial (and temporal) imperialism of the universum (literally, the whole ‘turned into one’). In an infi nite spatial universe, there is truly no place in space because place itself has been evacuated of its inherent qualities. . . . Henceforth, place is nothing more than pure position, or bare point, simply located on one of the XYZ axes that delineate the dimensionality of space as construed in Cartesian analytical geometry.” For further discussion of the evolution of concepts of “space” in modernity, see Alexander Koyré’s classic From the Closed World to the Infi nite Universe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).

2

Optical Space in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man André Topia

Critics have often noted the predominance in Joyce of the ear over the eye, of the auditory over the visual, his preference for rhythm and sound architectures rather than for pictures and pictorial space. Whereas, in his writings, visual impressions are often blurred, discontinuous, fragmentary, voices and sounds are perceived with remarkable intensity and precision. In an often-quoted passage from A Portrait, Stephen Dedalus explicitly claims this preference for the musical cadence of the sentence, what he calls “the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose” rather than a faithful reproduction of the visible reality, “the reflection of the glowing sensible world” (P 166–167). Nevertheless the eye and the gaze play an essential part in his work. One might even talk of a Joycean optical system. This may be analyzed in three directions. First the eye is a lensed optical system, more or less adjusted, resulting in a more or less blurred focus, in the photographic sense of optical accommodation. Then there is what we could call the circuits of the eye as a complicated trajectory: all the alternate movements made of returns, rebounds, loops, zigzagging, produced in the exchanges and circulation of looks. Finally the Joycean eye reveals its double nature as a kind of interface: it is both perceiver and perceived, surface and depth, opening and closure, contraction and expansion. It is well known that throughout his life Joyce was interested in cinematographic techniques, to the point of wanting to create a chain of cinemas in Dublin in 1909. Brendan Gallaher reports that in 1895, Joyce took him mysteriously to the family kitchen and showed him a red cardboard box which had “a hinged front and concealed rollers” and from which he “cranked . . . a lordly sequence of colored pictures of the Port of Southampton, the Pyramids of Egypt, and other splendors.” From what Gallaher told Ellmann, the whole scene seemed to be “part of a larger theatrical performance in which James and, unwittingly, Brendan, were taking part” (JJII 45–46). In one of his letters from Pola (December 28, 1904; Letters II 75) Joyce tells Stanislaus about a “bioscope,” a rudimentary form of cinematograph projecting animated pictures, and mentions his amusement when Nora is so caught by a dramatic scene that she mistakes the film for

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reality. Stephen Dedalus, in his diary at the end of A Portrait, mentions a visit “at a diorama” (P 249), a modern type of magic lantern defi ned by the OED as “a mode of scenic representation in which a picture, some portions of which are translucent, is viewed through an aperture, the sides of which are continued towards the picture; the light, which is thrown on the picture from the roof, may be diminished or increased at pleasure.” Already during his dreams about The Count of Monte Cristo, we had seen him experimenting with this type of optical show by building on the parlor table a kind of diorama: “an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in which chocolate is wrapped” (P 62). The subsequent vision of Mercedes emerges from this mise en scène. Significantly, optical metaphors appear at strategic points in Joyce’s work. Various misunderstandings that haunt the Joycean figures can often be explained in terms of more or less ill-focused vision, from the disastrously blurred eyesight of the child in “Araby” to the insidiously distorted vision of Gabriel Conroy at the end of “The Dead” or of Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa.” In A Portrait, Stephen’s experiences are almost always perceived through veiled eyes. When he wallows in his sin at the end of the sermon on hell he imagines himself “gazing out of darkened eyes” (P 111) and at the end of his confession he prays with “darkened eyes” (P 143), as if the fi lm of corruption that has darkened his world had its source in his very gaze. The dream visions of his adolescence are perceived through a “fi lm” that “veiled his eyes” (P 86), and he watches the prostitutes performing their mysterious rite out of “dim” eyes (P 100). Even at a moment of apparent revelation, when he seems to have at last seen the truth of God’s message, he is shown “[b]linded by his tears and by the light of God’s mercifulness” (P 145), with devastatingly ironical implications. This screen inserted between Stephen’s eyes and the world is more than a source of error: it destabilizes his sense of space and blurs the very spatiality of his Umwelt. Conversely, the epiphanic moment in Stephen Hero is defi ned through the image of a well-adjusted lens: it appears through “the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized” (SH 211). And when Stephen mentions the two faculties he considers necessary to the artist, the “selective faculty” and the “reproductive faculty,” the former, which can “disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defi ning circumstances” (SH 77–78), suggests again the optical focusing which allows one to pass from a blurred unreadable view to clear, welldefi ned outlines. No wonder then if the imperatives of religion and tradition are compared by the young artist to magic lanterns imposing on literary creation their distorting prism: “the lantern of justice, . . . the lantern of revelation, . . . the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and disfigure” (SH 186). In the

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unepiphanized world, the Joycean figures often move as if in a shadow theater where spatial markers are traps or optical illusions. The Christian mysteries themselves are presented in Stephen Hero as an optical illusion which appears to Stephen as incompatible with his very optical apparatus, for he is “equipped with a vision the angle of which would never adjust itself for the reception of hallucinations” (SH 74). One of the most frighteningly efficient of these hallucinatory models is the Ignatian compositio loci, which is explicitly announced at the beginning of Father Arnall’s sermon as a pattern of images whose function is to insert itself constantly between the child’s eye and the world, with the result that the child “will act and think with them always before his eyes” (P 111). In “Araby,” all the narrator’s misunderstanding crystallizes in images of wrongly focused lenses. From her very fi rst apparition to the child, Mangan’s sister, “her figure defi ned by the light” (D 30), looks like a photographic plate alternately revealing or masking such or such detail according to the degree of exposure or to the angle of incidence of the light. The two images between which the child’s look oscillates, that of the virgin and that of the venal woman, might be reduced to a variation of optical lenses, sometimes showing a pious image, sometimes an erotic photograph, according to the adjustment of the apparatus. The child himself is the accomplice of this strategy of delusion: we see him building his own optical apparatus in order to have his gaze converge on Mangan’s sister, observing her through the narrow interstice left by the blind which is “pulled down to within an inch of the sash” (D 30), just as one can open or close the aperture of a camera and project an image on a sensitive plate. The inner chamber of his eye becomes a camera obscura, where the girl’s image is as it were printed on his retina: “I kept her brown figure always in my eye” (D 30). She becomes a kind of filter interposed between his eye and what he sees: “[H]er image came between me and the page I strove to read” (D 32); whereas the other optical system, that of the prosaic world of work, becomes an unbearable screen: “[I]t stood between me and my desire” (D 32). Here again the child’s Umwelt appears governed by conflicting spatial models, which deny him any stable hermeneutic stance. Another optical construction is built as a kind of antidote to his inevitable separation from the girl. When he follows her on her way to school, he realizes that their two trajectories, which he kept fused as long as he could, must part, and that the two lines of their respective journeys must inevitably deviate from each other when they reach “the point at which our ways diverged” (D 30). This divergence is both geometrical and optical: the word is used in optics to designate the separation of light beams from a single point. Here it is the moment when the image of the girl, such as it is fi xed on the child’s retina, and the figure of the real girl he is following will cease to be superimposed. Confronted with this inevitable divergence, the child’s strategy consists in reversing the process of separation. For this he resorts to a complex bricolage involving both geometry and optics, literally

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constructing a kind of trompe l’œil apparatus. Instead of letting the girl’s trajectory diverge from his own, he takes the initiative of the deviation by overtaking her just before reaching the point in space where this divergence will become inevitable: “I quickened my pace and passed her” (D 30). Thus, by simply readjusting his perceived space, he transmutes an objective necessity into a position of superiority and gives his dependence an appearance of mastery, putting his optical system in the service of a strategy of camouflage. We can already fi nd here, in miniature, this trompe l’œil technique which will reach its culmination with Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa.” In “Two Gallants,” the difference between Corley and Lenehan can be read in terms of complementary deficiencies in their respective optical systems: reductive monocularity in Corley, optical blurring due to an illadjusted focus in Lenehan. Corley uses his eyes as a kind of sign language to reinforce his minimal or non-existent answers: in response to one of Lenehan’s questions, he “closed one eye expressively as an answer” (D 52), thus presenting what is in fact a reduction of his field of vision as a sign of his superiority. We also learn that he “always stared straight before him” (D 51), ignoring and crushing margins and peripheries, thus manifesting a monocularity and narrow field of vision widespread in Dublin and whose devastating effects will be shown in “Cyclops.” When he knits his brows, he literally regroups them (“his brows gathered,” D 53) bringing his eyes closer together until they are only one, thus practicing the reverse of that “agility and training [of] the eye” (U 12.945–946) which Bloom will mention as an antidote to Cyclopean myopia. On the contrary, Lenehan’s eyes seem to be, with his feet, the most agile part of his body, but this visual mobility has for counterpart a difficulty in optical focusing, which prevents him from superimposing the contradictory images transmitted to him by his erratic vision. When the two men draw near the girl, he wants to “have a squint at her” (D 54), a phrase which, beside its familiar meaning of “to have a look,” also designates strabism, that is, “a defective coincidence of the optic axes” (OED). His pathetic “vision” (D 57) at the eating-house suggests a comparably impossible coincidence: it oscillates between two contradictory alienated cliché images—that of venal girls and that of the ideal “good simple-minded girl” (D 58)—but it completely scotomizes the waitress, who is quite real, in front of his eyes, and serves him a very nourishing food. The second axis of Joycean optical space concerns the complex circulation at work in the exchange of looks. Ulysses offers a particularly rich sampling with the scopic exchanges between the mermaids and the drinkers in “Sirens,” or the complex network of gazes linking Gerty MacDowell and Bloom in “Nausicaa.” Already in A Portrait, the eye is at once what sees the other and what is seen by the other, both the opening of the perception process, allowing looks to be exchanged or avoided, and one element among others in this mobile configuration that is a face. For the eye is “in” the face, but the nature of this “in” is difficult to assess. Faces and eyes are

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often inextricably linked in A Portrait and they must be examined in terms of network, of configuration, almost of topology. Very early, Joyce shows an interest in this strange organ which is the eye. Already in 1896, in his essay “Trust Not Appearances,” written when he was still at Belvedere college, he writes: “[T]here is a ‘something’ that tells us the character of a man. It is the eye . . . It is the eye that reveals to man the guilt or innocence, the vices or the virtues of the soul” (CW 16). No wonder that we regularly fi nd in his work very precise notations on the configuration of the eye. But much more than just an origin of perception, the eye often seems to have an almost physical power of touch and contact, like the other parts of the body. In “Counterparts,” right from the fi rst page, Farrington’s eyes appear as one of the most significant parts of his body: “[H]is eyes bulged forward slightly and the whites of them were dirty” (D 86). Later in the story the two details are fused and we are told twice about his “heavy dirty eyes” (D 94). The bulging and the stain of dirt on the white of the eye have complex implications and seem to be linked with the almost physical immediacy of Farrington’s gaze, as if the little potency that is left in him were concentrated in his eyes. This organ appears as a threat to the white space of paper on which the copyist’s words must be inscribed. During the fi rst confrontation between Farrington and Mr. Alleyne there is an almost causal effect between Farrington’s “gazing fi xedly at the head upon the pile of papers” and the fact that immediately, as if under the maleficent effect of this eye, Mr. Alleyne’s paper cosmos disintegrates and from a “pile of documents” becomes a “pile of papers” (D 87). In “A Painful Case,” one of the most striking physical details we are given about Mrs. Sinico bears on the movements of her pupil: Their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil reasserted itself quickly, this half-disclosed nature fell again under the reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fulness, struck the note of defiance more defi nitely. (D 109–110) This contraction of Mrs. Sinico’s pupils was a fact medically observed and has been identified by J. B. Lyons as “hippus,”1 which is defi ned as “a rhythmic contraction and dilatation of the pupil independently of the light intensity” (OED). It was associated at the time with mental trouble and L. W. Fox sees in it “a chronic spasm of the iris, as is seen in hysteria, neurasthenia.”2 But here this strange spasm is implacably reintegrated in Mrs. Sinico’s moral frame. In a world governed by moral and social censorship, the great passionate movements of her soul, whose only visible signs are this contraction and expansion of the pupil, appear as the symptoms of a great moral battle where virtue is ultimately victorious, even though at

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the cost of a heavy sacrifice. What remains visible are but the traces of this potentially complex, even though unactualized, story. These few ocular spasms seem to condense the main phases of a potential drama of adultery: provocation, confusion, moment of weakness, unveiling, return to order, victory of virtue. All the ingredients of a great novel of manners are there, with Mrs. Sinico as an Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, or Effi Briest, but this displacement of a human crisis into ocular symptoms is a way of nipping in the bud any possibility of tragedy by playing it in advance in the form of a virtual model whose unfolding is already closed. The role of the beautifully balanced sentence, here totally governed by Mr. Duffy’s point of view, is to close in advance the field of possibilities. This ocular spasm also illustrates the double movement of gnomonic reduction/expansion already started in “The Sisters” and which governs practically all the stories. In the fi rst part of “A Painful Case” we see Mrs. Sinico contracting her pupil until it becomes an imperceptible point on the brink of disappearance (“swoon”), while Mr. Duffy, seen through the tiny opening of his partner’s eye, seems to follow a movement of unlimited expansion: “[I]n her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature” (D 111). On the contrary, in the second part, Mrs. Sinico grows until she occupies Mr. Duffy’s whole mental space, while he, conversely, sees the frontiers of his ego being reduced to the tiny point of the last word: “alone” (D 117). The eye is the central point of this loop, marking the frontier between exterior and interior space, but also working as a fi lter able to produce infi nite expansion or infi nite reduction. In “Nausicaa,” Bloom will shrewdly note of Gerty’s eye that its beauty comes more from the white than from the pupil: “Fine eyes she had, clear. It’s the white of the eye brings that out not so much the pupil” (U 13.906– 908). This sums up all the difference between Bloom’s and Gerty’s optical systems. The predominance of the white of the eye, which has a purely aesthetic effect reinforced by the “eyebrowleine which gave that haunting expression to the eyes” (U 13.111–112), and plays no part in vision, over the pupil, which is the real center of visual activity, betrays Gerty’s actual blindness: she does not see Bloom but the projected image of the “dreamhusband” (U 13.431). Unlike Bloom’s extraordinarily mobile optical lens, Gerty’s eye functions as an aestheticized object of vision: it is there not only to see but to be seen. Throughout A Portrait, what is transmitted to the reader of the relations between the characters is often reduced to details about faces and movements of the eyes. This complex circulation sometimes almost resembles a kind of semaphore which directly links a face to another face, with signals passing from eyes to eyes in a complicated zigzagging movement. Stephen’s face often mirrors that of the person he is speaking to. Following in this the strategy of the cuckoo bird, he enters, whenever possible, a form which is sent to him by someone else and tries to occupy it, or, when he cannot, to neutralize it by sending it back to the sender. Several times we see him using

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his own face as a mere mirror throwing back and defusing the signals sent by the faces he encounters and which he perceives as dangers. This he does with his fellow student and enemy Heron: “his face mirrored his rival’s false smile” (P 78), thus replacing possible conflict by a harmless symmetry. He uses the same strategy during his interview with the director of the Jesuits (“Stephen’s face gave back the priest’s indulgent smile” [P 154]), fearing to enter into a confl ict with such an adversary and thus defusing the pressure which he feels exerted on him concerning his future vocation. To these mirror structures one might add the complex interaction sometimes taking place between the eyes and the light surrounding them. At the end of the preamble to the sermon on hell, the child sees the flame in Father Arnall’s eyes coloring the twilight sky and in turn making hellish the texture of worldly space: “In the silence their dark fi re kindled the dusk into a tawny glow” (P 108). But a few years later, during Stephen’s interview with the director, in a room colored by “the waning of the long summer daylight” (P 154), Stephen now sees in the priest’s eyes nothing but the passive reflection of this crepuscular gleam, “a mirthless reflection of the sunken day” (P 160), a sign of the gradual waning of the controlling images linked with the college and their replacement by a new, profane flame, “the tiny flame kindling upon his cheek” (P 155). This new flame is being substituted, as if symmetrically, for the fi re in the priest’s eyes which terrified the child during the sermon. We are thus led to follow a looping trajectory which begins with the priest fleetingly reviving a sinking light and ends with Stephen eclipsing this same light with a new incipient glow. But this silent drama appears in the text only indirectly, through colored reflections which we see playing and confl icting in eyes or on faces. One then understands the impression of strangeness produced on the child in the fi rst chapter by the sight of two faces, his own and his mother’s, moving closer to each other for a kiss: “You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. . . . Why did people do that with their two faces?” (P 15). This conjunction appears to the child as a scandal, for it is in sharp contrast with the circuitous mode of apparition of faces to which he has been used, which functions through reflections and exchanges, where each being emits signals which are sent back, avoided, mimicked, neutralized, or deviated. Whereas the verb most frequently used to designate the movement of a face in the act of looking is “to raise” or “to lift,” which implies an orientation and involvement of the whole body (“he did not dare to raise his eyes to Wells’s face” [P 14]; “he raised his eyes to the priest’s face” [P 160]; “Stephen lifted his eyes in wonder” [P 50]), here the exchange is reduced to a simple mechanical adjustment between “put up” and “put down.” This sudden promiscuity joining two corporeal zones in space crushes the entire fragile semaphorical network and turns it into a mere physical conjunction whose erotic implications evade the child. What is at stake in this puzzling interactive spatiality of bodies is the child’s very capacity of deciphering the world.

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Stephen’s great encounters, real or imaginary, with female figures are always mediated by the eyes. This is particularly true for his meeting with the young prostitute, which is mainly an exchange of gazes (P 100–101). From the fi rst moment, the young woman “gazed into his face,” and when Stephen is alone with her in her room, his excitement is focused on “her face lifted to him in serious calm” rather than on her body. The voice is absent, as if blocked. “He tried to bid his tongue speak,” but Stephen’s whole expressiveness seems to have moved from his tongue to his eyes: “Tears of joy and relief shone in his delighted eyes and his lips parted though they would not speak.” Even when the young woman’s lips touch his, he continues to stare at her eyes, which become like a surface on which a mysterious message is being inscribed: “[H]e read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes.” The scene appears more as the transmission of this message from eyes to eyes than as a carnal exchange. Seeing the importance of the two allusions to Shelley in A Portrait (P 96, 212–213), one might be tempted to see in this image of a message read in the mirror of someone else’s eyes another Shelleyan echo: that of the scene in Prometheus Unbound where Panthea transmits to Asia the image of the Promethean soul which has remained printed on her eyes and which she lets her sister read as if in a reflecting mirror: “Oh, lift / Thine eyes, that I meay read his written soul! / . . . beyond their inmost depth / I see a shade, a shape.”3 Similarly Stephen becomes the repository of a silent language which replaces the “inarticulate cries” (P 99) heard during his night walks among the prostitutes. After these spasms which threatened him with aphasia, the movement is reversed: once Stephen’s eyes have registered the message reflected on those of the young woman, they can close, thus opening an access to interiority and allowing the woman’s lips to print, as if with a stylus, mysterious signs on a mental blank page: “They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech” (P 101). As with Shelley, the eye has been the vehicle of a mystical transport. In the wading-girl episode, the silent exchange between Stephen and the girl is also mediated by the eyes with an almost chiasmic symmetry: “[W]hen she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze. . . . Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his” (P 171). This perfect symmetry of the exchange between watcher and watched betrays Stephen’s romantic illusions. The mirror circuit between the man’s and the woman’s eyes allows the young artist to escape from the dissymmetry between male and female body and to substitute infi nite mirror reflections for sexual complementarity. The eye is both surface and depth, a point of encounter between mental interiority and the exteriority of the world: both an opening, one of these “doors of perception” mentioned by Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, through which the world can enter and print itself as if in a darkroom,

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and a window from which the invisible soul can become visible, both the departure point of a dynamic orientation and a visual surface on which inscriptions can be read. Still, if the eye escapes from the body through the invisible circuits it engenders, it is also rooted in the body. In fact, it is at both ends: both an optical lens, which mediates the real and transmutes it into a mental image, and a purely physical organ dependent on physiological mechanisms. Thus Stephen’s space is constantly balanced between optical construction and organic precariousness. The paradoxical nature of bi-ocularity is alluded to twice in A Portrait, but with opposite implications, the eye being either an optical lens or a physiological orifice. When Stephen has trouble reading the printed lines of his book in class, he notes a difference of vision between his two eyes: “[I]t was only by closing his right eye tight tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out the full curves of the capital” (P 46). This optical disparity announces the theme of parallax, which will be so important in Ulysses. Conversely, when, in his diary, Stephen imagines his Italian teacher “cry two round rogue’s tears, one from each eye” (P 249), his two eyes are no longer two independent, dissociated optical lenses, but simple physiological orifices appearing to be endowed with autonomous lachrymal production. This double nature of the eye— actively outward looking and yet open to interior legibility—explains why Stephen’s space keeps oscillating between architectural expansion and mental reduction. Moreover the activity of looking is often linked with gestures in which the body is indissociably involved. Dubliners offers several examples of this physical involvement. In “Counterparts” we learn that Farrington’s eyes “bulged forward slightly” (D 86), as if his gaze were only the visible continuation of a corporeal impulse, but also as if he were trying to touch the world with his eyes. In “An Encounter,” the pervert’s eyes seem to originate directly from the spasms of his body, “peering at me from under a twitching forehead” (D 27), and the encounter between the child’s and the man’s eyes becomes almost a carnal contact, the man’s eye turning into a substitute for an impotent phallus. In “Two Gallants,” this physical anchorage of the look becomes almost terrifying: “when he wished to gaze after someone in the street, it was necessary for him to move his body from the hips” (D 51), as if an invisible thread linked the eye to the almost animal depths of the body. The eyes are “in” the face, but this face is itself part of the unstable economy of the body, where human expressiveness is often displaced toward partial zones at the expense of central activity, turning human beings into mobile networks and unstable combinations which seem to be constantly disintegrating or recomposing. An example of this fluid movement can be found in A Portrait with Donovan, whose eyes and voice play a visual and vocal ballet oscillating between disappearance and reappearance, like a kind of vanishing trick. This blurring process is due to the

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use of the same verb, “vanish,” to designate the veiling of the eyes and the muting of the voice: “his small fatencircled eyes vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing” (P 210). After this “vanishing” of both eyes and voice, the same verb, “come forth,” is used again to indicate their simultaneous reappearance: “[H]is eyes and his voice came forth again from their lurkingplaces” (P 210). Thus a visual detail (the eyes) and an auditory one (the voice) are treated as equivalent, as if the voice could disclose itself by issuing from the mouth, and hide again by returning to it, in the same way as eyes alternately sink into the folds of the face when they close, and reemerge when they open again. This inextricable entanglement of body and voice makes of speech a mere physical phenomenon and of the mouth an orifice “in which” the voice resides, just as the eyes are “in” their sockets. It is this conjunction of vertical emergence and horizontal displacement that makes eyes so difficult to situate in the economy of the face. This ambivalence may explain why sometimes the face almost vanishes. Faces are often seen appearing and disappearing around Stephen, like lamps being switched on or off. This betrays their problematic status and reveals them as both strategic zones and vulnerable areas. In the episode when Stephen tries to imagine the wounded marshal, the marshal’s face is both a “pale” area which stands out in the darkness and this darkness itself: “They looked at him and saw their master’s face . . . But only the dark was where they looked” (P 19). The face itself vacillates phantasmatically between the clear and the obscure, apparition and vanishing. Likewise, when Stephen acts in the play performed at school, he perceives the public fi rst as “the innumerable faces of the void,” then, after the end of the play, as “the void of faces breaking at all points” (P 85). This vacillation may be due to the fact that the face, which plays the part of a kind of dispatching center, both emitting and receiving messages, is involved in such complex exchanges that the circuits blow when the tension is too strong. Being a major marker in the construction of private space, the face opens up different spatialities according whether it is perceived in an individual exchange or as a collective entity. What often perturbs Stephen when he meets people’s eyes is that they may be the center of an autonomous expressiveness which contradicts the rest of the face. During the Christmas dinner, when he observes Mr. Casey, fi rst he feels that Mr. Casey’s whole face is looking at him: “Stephen looked with affection at Mr Casey’s face which stared across the table” (P 35). But then things appear much less simple: what had fi rst appeared as a homogeneous area, easy to interpret, turns out a much more differentiated network than it seemed at fi rst sight: “He liked to sit near him at the fi re, looking up at his dark fierce face. But his dark eyes were never fierce and his slow voice was good to listen to” (P 35). The face appears less as surface than as an economy governed by a complex system of values where positive and negative traits keep shifting in their

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relation to each other. What may have fi rst appeared as a unified space turns out to be a highly differentiated field. The same disparity can be found between Father Arnall’s eyes and his voice when he is in front of his pupils in class. Stephen discovers that the black color of the priest’s face is not a stable value, but may fluctuate and be associated with opposite reactions. It may mean pleasure, as when the children compete at sums: “Father Arnall’s face looked very black but he was not in a wax: he was laughing” (P 12). But it may also mean anger, as when the children are unable to answer his question in the Latin class: “But his face was blacklooking and his eyes were staring though his voice was so quiet” (P 47). In both cases, the auditory message of the voice seems to contradict the visual message of the black color. Face and eyes then appear more as a rebus than as a readable inscription. Stephen’s relation to his own face is just as problematic. It partakes of the unsolved mystery of his own body, which the adolescent remembers when thinking of his childhood years: “[H]e . . . remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body” (P 168). Stephen feels sensations on his face without being able to see the visual area where they are situated, even though this area is visible to anybody but himself. All he can do is build a system of rather rudimentary correspondences between the sensations taking place on this zone of his body and what he imagines is seen by others. Thus in the episode of the rivalry in class between York and Lancaster (P 12), Stephen projects on his own face colors he cannot see, but which he constructs from a whole system of correlations. First the association is between red and pride, when he is announced victorious: “Stephen felt his own face red.” Then it is between white and coolness: “He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool.” Pride/red, coolness/white: we have here the basic elements of these binary systems which Stephen keeps building all along the fi rst chapter in order to link his self to other people. Still, a little later, he will discover that his system is wrong and that the whiteness of his face, instead of being due to his coolness, comes from the fever: “Sick in your breadbasket, Fleming said, because your face looks white” (P 13). Ironically, this reading of his face can only be made by other eyes than his. Conversely, if he is so terrified by Father Dolan’s “nocoloured eyes” (P 50), a detail which reappears hauntingly in his thoughts, it is because their lack of color puts the priest’s eyes outside the child’s system and destroys the network of correlations he has so patiently built. But the eye which sees is also seen, and this discovery is at the origin of one of the most terrifying moments in A Portrait, when Stephen lifts his eyes to see Father Dolan’s face (P 50). The priest’s eyes appear at the center of a series of concentric circles which may correspond to Aquinas’s three phases of perception as they will be developed by Stephen in Chapter V. There is first the phase of integritas: the apparition of the “baldy whitegrey head” against the blurred background. Then the circles become narrower and more

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differentiated, corresponding to consonantia: “fluff at the side,” then “the steel rims of his spectacles.” But then, through a devastating reversal, claritas, the revelation of the “nocoloured eyes looking through the glasses,” belongs not to Stephen but to Father Dolan, for at the very moment when the child reaches the end of his perception and plunges into the heart of the spiral, the movement is reversed and the center perceived by Stephen becomes a center perceiving him. What he has built with difficulty as a controllable visual area suddenly abolishes distance and perspective and destroys his frontiers. Though the first two phases of perception seemed to contribute to Stephen’s mastery of the visual field, in the third phase, space is turned inside out and Stephen is suddenly rejected to the periphery. Moreover, one of the disturbing paradoxes of the eye is that it may reveal more by what is seen in it than by what it sees. When Father Dolan, after calling Fleming “A born idler!” adds “I can see it in the corner of his eye” (P 49), he suddenly seems to engender another Fleming, hidden in the corner of the child’s eye, as if what cannot be seen at the center had moved to the “corner.” This presence of a corner in the eye seems to betray a peripheral vision contradicting the central vision. Thus Fleming is an obedient pupil at the center of his eye, and an idler on the periphery. Already in “The Sisters,” the image of the corner illustrates the general shrinking of the child’s space. During the visit to the dead priest, we can see him twice stealing furtively and gropingly to his “corner” (D 14, 17), as if into blanks or holes in space, escaping from the central religious revelation to take refuge in shadowy zones beyond the frontiers of this truth. This “side eye” will reappear in Ulysses at the beginning of “Telemachus” with Stephen casting “[a] side eye at my Hamlet hat” (U 3.390), this “œil en coin” which Hélène Cixous will see as one the main sources of displacement in the text.4 The analogy between the corner perceived by Father Dolan in Fleming’s eye and that into which the child takes refuge in “The Sisters” links the eye with the double movement of gnomonic reduction/expansion which governs the Joycean text. Like the Euclidian gnomon, the corner is a fraction geometrically similar to the whole figure, but at a reduced scale. Just as the parallelogram can grow or diminish while remaining analogous to itself by moving along its diagonal, 5 the corner appears included in two opposite movements. In the Father Dolan episode, the corner is this portion, in excess or missing, which upsets the economy of the eye and contaminates the whole being. When Stephen in his turn deciphers the face of the dean of studies, he does it with optical metaphors. The sight of the priest’s face triggers a series of questions starting from two opposite images which imply two opposite hypotheses about the mysterious person of the priest: “an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus” (P 187). The lamp and the reflector point to two opposite relations to the divine light: mediation or reflection—but in both cases the process seems to have gone wrong. The “unlit lamp” shows the priest as having lost the link with the divine light;

50 André Topia the “reflector hung in a false focus” makes him a wrong mediation, a distorting prism, a mediator who wastes or deviates from what he is supposed to transmit. These two images crystallize the great question which haunts all the Dubliners stories and illustrates the two successive phases of Father Flynn’s trajectory: from vanished to perverted mediation. There again the perception of light, whether in its optical or in its spiritual sense, remains open to a crucial alternative. This may be why Stephen, when he reaches his paroxysm of guilt at the end of the sermon on hell, passes from the eye to the sexual organ in order to illustrate what appears to him most horrible in sin: “The eyes see the thing, without having wished fi rst to see. Then in an instant it happens. But does that part of the body understand or what? . . . It must understand when it desires in one instant and then prolongs its own desire instant after instant, sinfully” (P 139). The scandal is in the shift from “to see” to “to desire,” from vision to consumption, from the stasis of perception to the “kinetic” in which Stephen later will see “unesthetic emotions” (P 206). We have already seen the slightly monstrous image of an eye contaminated by kinetic impulses with Farrington’s “dirty” and “bulging” eye in “Counterparts,” or Corley’s eye rising from his hips in “Two Gallants.” In Ulysses, the “Sirens” episode will go even further in these displacements and show a “goggle eye” (U 11.146) as if in erection and an “other eye” (U 11.148) which may suggest either a vagina (one of the slang words for penis is “eyeopener”),6 or the anus through which Bloom will send his fi nal message (here again slang gives us “roundeye” and “blind-eye”7; in French “œil de bronze”8). We are far from the young poet’s ecstasies, but the Joycean circuits of the eye include other orifices than the pupil. The eye also oscillates between opening and closing, expansion and contraction. In the eyes that Stephen perceives around him, the messages to decipher are always closely linked with a physical rhythm, a kind of pulse of elementary signals resisting any clear translation. All through the Christmas dinner he sees around him eyes opening and closing, as if punctuating variable intensities whose origin escapes him and where he can only perceive surface effects. The eyes appear as interfaces which either close on invisible thoughts merely relayed by voices, or open to send semaphorical messages which the child registers as best he can, as when his father winks at him (P 33). Mr. Casey’s eyes illustrate this ocular signaling. They seem to display a message paralleling the story told to the child and allowing him to follow almost mimetically the successive phases of the ritual battle fought by their owner. They are fi rst almost extinguished: “Mr Casey . . . smiled at Stephen with sleepy eyes” (P 28); closing just before the beginning of the story: “He closed his eyes wearily” (P 36). But this closure is the starting point of a new movement in the opposite direction. As soon as he begins the story of the blinded woman “Mr Casey opened his eyes” (P 36), and from this moment the powers of his eyes will be gradually revived while the woman is

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deprived of her eyesight. The climax of his story is followed by the removal of a veil-like a screen in front of his eyes, “scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb” (P 39), until the triumphant return of his ocular powers: “He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes” (P 39). But this triumph will be short-lived and will vanish in the last sentence with the return to Stephen’s father, whose eyes are now veiled with tears, but also with sentimental complacency (P 39). Being by its very nature a point of passage between outer and inner space, the eye is a strategic nexus governing both opening and closing, at the center of a loop alternately expanding and contracting. Paradoxically, the movement of expansion and opening toward the invisible is often concomitant with a closure of the envelope of the body. The eye appears as a screen which is both what conceals and the surface on which images are projected. The eyes of the young girl seen by Stephen in the street are marked by this ambivalence: “[P]erhaps the secret of her race lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow” (P 221). Whereas her eyes seem to open onto a secret world and to reveal the riddle not only of a person but of a whole race, the shadow of her eyelashes trembles in front of this opening and brings us back to this oscillation between unveiling and vanishing. This is perhaps why eyelids are far from absent from Joycean eyes (P 137, 172, 206, 228, 234). They are the membrane which can either allow or forbid entry into the mental inner world. In Stephen’s speech to Lynch on perception they are the example chosen by Stephen to illustrate the reflexes of the nervous system: “Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye” (P 206). The orifice of the eye in the corporeal envelope can be either the shutter of a lens which opens to let the image of the world enter the darkroom, or a frontier protecting the integrity of the mental territory. Several times the membrane of the eyelids is seen trembling under the pressure of visions which try to force a passage, so that the lids become the last defense beyond which the real becomes hallucination. But this closing, as often in the Joycean loop figures, is only a prelude to a reversal. On several occasions, the eye fi rst closes, then reverses itself, as it were, turning toward the inner being to open again onto an obscurity which is symmetrical with the external light, giving access to a new type of vision. In the episode of the vision of the wounded marshal, the sudden change of focus (“He saw the dark,” P 19) suggests the optical system of a camera, which one can activate or release at will. Stephen can be seen practicing this activation/deactivation of perception during his visit to Cork with his father: “he closed his eyes and walked on in darkness” (P 91), thus announcing the Berkeleyan experiment he will make on Sandymount beach at the beginning of the “Proteus” episode in Ulysses, closing his eyes to see if everything will disappear, then realizing, when he reopens them, that the world was “[t]here all the time without

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you” (U 3.27). But the Stephen we see in A Portrait is more an artist than a philosopher and when he reopens his eyes, the light enters through them as if through the lens of a camera chamber, producing almost phantasmagoric optical effects: “The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light” (P 92). The photographic analogy reappears more explicitly on the next page when Stephen, reviewing his past years, feels as if he had gone through a kind of extinction similar to the fading of a sensitive plate in the sunlight: “He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun . . . How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun” (P 93). This obliteration of his self by the light like an overexposed film turns him into a passive surface and completely negates all the complex optical systems through which Joycean figures mediate the world. It is the very opposite of the composition of place carefully staged by Stephen when, during the sermon on hell, he imagines his mystical wedding with Emma in a chapel where the light “filtered through the lowered blinds” and where a ray of light enters “through the fissure between the last blind and the sash” (P 116). Contrary to photographic overexposure, this narrowing of the optical aperture makes visible all the transfigurations of the object perceived. It recalls the rays of light fi ltering “through the lace end of the blind” in the mortuary chamber in “The Sisters” (D 14), the interstice of the half-open door through which the light outlines the figure of Mangan’s sister in “Araby” (D 30), and the “shaft of light” which contributes to Gabriel’s erotic mise en scène at the end of “The Dead” (D 216). While being the window of the soul, the eye is also a magic lantern for all adolescent scenarios. This double movement of expansion/contraction, starting from the eye and returning to it, also governs Stephen’s hallucinatory vision of an equation on the page of his notebook: The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. (P 103) The tiny opening of the eye, opening and closing, not only alternately engenders and destroys a whole cosmos, but also becomes the nodal point from which every mutation of the artist’s soul surges and flows back, “unfolding itself . . . and folding back upon itself” (P 103). The oscillation verge/center, outward/inward reproduces in a hallucinated form Stephen’s constant back and forth movement between the hieroglyphics of the world and the arabesques of his vision, as if the lens of his eye were the central node of this loop along which the child keeps traveling, sometimes projecting himself

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into imaginary personae and experiences, sometimes withdrawing within the limits of protected frontiers. At the end of the sermon on hell, the vision of bestial creatures embodying Stephen’s sins also begins with the apparition of faces condensing themselves into eyes: “Faces were there; eyes: they waited and watched” (P 136). In front of these gazes which seem to be casting nets at him, Stephen tries to cut off the scopic circuit which links faces and eyes like magnetic poles: “He . . . covered his face with his hands” (P 136). But the tropism of ocular attraction is too strong and, confronted with the failure of his attempt, he tries to shut the windows of his eyes, “binding down his eyelids,” and thus to close his interiority hermetically “until the senses of his soul closed” (P 137). But then a reversal takes place and in spite, or rather because, of the closing of the corporeal envelope, another eye seems to open onto another, hallucinatory space: “[T]he senses of his soul closed. They closed for an instant and then opened. He saw” (P 137). The ocular model remains so powerful that it functions beyond strictly scopic circuits, thus announcing the various mutations of the eye in Ulysses. There is in A Portrait a mental eye, the “eyes of his mind” (P 86), through which Stephen imagines his adolescent longings rising like incense, and a mnemonic eye, “his remembering eyes” (P 226), on which he projects a past scene. Later in the chapter, it is these “eyes of memory” (P 233) which open during the vision triggered by the erroneous memory of Nashe’s line. Again his vision fi rst focuses on eyes: “Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east” (P 233). But again they appear as a trompe l’œil surface behind which corruption is soon revealed: “What was their languid grace but the softness of chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart” (P 333). We are there on the borderline where the scopic arises from mnemonic traces and where the “brightness” perceived in the dark directly comes from Stephen’s readings. And, as in the episode of the monstrous creatures of his sin, the moment when Stephen closes his eyes is the beginning of a new vision: “The life of his body, illclad, illfed, louseeaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair: and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling from the air” (P 234). But the fi nal paradox—another looping of the loop—is that the scopic circuits never really put in question the predominance of the auditory over the visual, from which we had started. When talking of eye and gaze, one is constantly led to do so in terms of rhythm and oscillation, thus meeting again the terms of “poise and balance,” “rhythmic rise and fall” (P 166) used by Stephen when he asserts his preference for the audible and the musicality of language. The Joycean eye, far from building a space and offering, like the painter’s eye, “the reflection of the glowing sensible world,” is finally nothing else than this pulsation, and both eye and voice join in this oscillation between the visible and the invisible.

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NOTES 1. John B. Lyons, James Joyce and Medicine (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1973), 85. 2. L. Webster Fox, Diseases of the Eye (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), 428. 3. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820), in Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), II i 109–117. 4. Hélène Cixous, “D’un œil en coin,” Ulysses cinquante ans après, ed. Louis Bonnerot (Paris: Didier, 1974), 162. 5. David Weir, “Gnomon Is an Island: Euclid and Bruno in Joyce’s Narrative Technique,” James Joyce Quarterly 28:2 (Winter 1991), 348. 6. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Historical Slang, abridged by Jacqueline Simpson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 299. 7. Richard A. Spears, Slang and Euphemisms (New York: New American Library, 1981), 35, 345. 8. François Caradec, Dictionnaire du français argotique et populaire (Paris: Larousse, 1977), 175.

3

The Acoustic Space of Ulysses Valérie Bénéjam

Although Joyce famously claimed to Budgen that his picture of Dublin was so accurate the city could be rebuilt from it, it is debatable whether this could actually be done if all other traces of Dublin were erased.1 The concern with architecture in Ulysses is not as self-evident as Joyce’s focus on urban space would seem to imply. Visualizing the buildings in Ulysses certainly proves fascinating, and defi nitely contributes to our understanding and enjoyment of the book, but reading Ulysses does not spontaneously produce architectural pictures or plans in one’s “mind’s eye.” In fact, the very existence of critical work aiming at visualizing the architecture in Joyce’s book points to the need to provide such pictures for readers unfamiliar with Dublin (or for those too young to have known the original house at 7 Eccles Street); but by the same token it implies that such representations do not come automatically when reading. 2 Thus, in Gunn and Wright’s online article titled “Visualizing Joyce,” entering the three-dimensional model of the house on Eccles Street virtually is both such a riveting experience and one so distant from the experience of reading Ulysses, that it paradoxically exposes the limited efficacy of Joyce’s visual rendering of space.3 This chapter will argue that the architectural space of Ulysses is perhaps more fruitfully investigated in its acoustic rendition, and show how this is made possible by Joyce’s interest in the purely acoustic properties of sound (pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration) and in their ability to exist in, and hence defi ne, space. In the Linati schema, architecture is listed as the science for “Lestrygonians.” However, it does not appear as a prominent feature of the episode, at least not as conspicuously as does food: quite a few buildings, façades, and shopfronts are mentioned, but not to the extent that it would mark a significant difference with the other outdoor episodes in Ulysses. A few puns refer to architecture, yet most of them are later additions to the typescript, and it is debatable whether they would be noticed without the Linati schema entry.4 The word “architecture” itself appears as such only once in Ulysses, and appropriately this occurs in “Lestrygonians.” This mention, however, is far from straightforward. The term materializes in a conspicuously awkward sentence, just a few lines before the end of the episode: as

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Bloom is looking at the façade of the Museum, which he is about to enter so as to avoid meeting Boylan on Kildare street, he remarks, “Sir Thomas Deane was the Greek architecture” (U 8.1180–1181). Bloom is always notable for his imprecisions, but this sentence is a mistake on multiple levels. It is fi rst a factual error: Sir Thomas Deane had designed a couple of museums (the Trinity College Museum Building in 1857 and the Ruskin Museum at Oxford in 1861), but the National Library and Museum in Dublin were both designed in the early 1880s not by Sir Thomas Deane, but by his son and grandson Sir Thomas Newenham Deane and Sir Thomas Manly Deane.5 Bloom’s identification of the architect as Sir Thomas Deane thus erases the duality as well as the middle names of Deane’s son and grandson. This might come as a reminder that Bloom’s own middle name is neither accurate nor too “Manly” (“Paula,” U 17.1855). However, it is not the sole mistake in Bloom’s architectural pronouncement. Sir Thomas Deane the elder was praised by Ruskin for his “Lombardo-Venetian style,” or in other words for his reaction against the early nineteenth-century Greek revival in architecture. His son and grandson on the other hand practiced the “Renaissance style” taught by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which cannot technically be called “Greek,” but might be reminiscent of Greek architecture through its handling of columns and pediments. This may explain Bloom’s statement, although identifying the National Museum as “Greek architecture” designed by Sir Thomas Deane remains at best an approximation, perhaps prompting us to wonder whether, when it comes to exactitude in technical matters, “inaccuracy” is not Leopold Bloom’s true middle name. It is unlikely, however, that many readers will know—or will bother to check—the name and style of the actual architects of the museum. The one mistake which everyone notices is primarily syntactical: the sentence, even in a hurried Boylan-avoiding panic, should either have been complemented by putting the name of Sir Thomas Deane in the possessive case, or the word “architecture” should have been replaced by “architect.” Most of Bloom’s sentences in this passage are incomplete, sometimes unsyntactical for lack of punctuation, or excessively compact as Joyce renders the condensed inner speech of his character, but rarely are they fitted with the wrong word. The mistake makes no sense, unless we abandon the psychological coherence of the character and consider the overall logic of the book. Joyce may have wanted to place the word “architecture” at the end of the “Lestrygonians” episode, highlighted as it is by Bloom’s flimsy syntax, precisely so that this mention, the only occurrence of the word in the whole book, might echo the “architecture” written in the column for science in the schema for Ulysses which was being circulated.6 The schema of correspondences being entirely dependent for its coherence on the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, the architecture could be nothing but “Greek,” and this quite independently from the respective styles of Sir Thomas Deane or of his successors. Thus, if architecture is to be connected with Ulysses, it probably should not be in the derived form

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of “architectural,” but in that of “architectonic.” The “oversystematized” structure of Ulysses—as outlined in the Linati schema—is the architecture, and the schema itself the architectural plan.7 Hence the reference to “Greek architecture” in “Lestrygonians,” which is not so much a comment on the architectural style of the museum, but an allusion to the Greek Homeric text whose architecture is the structure for Ulysses as a whole. The word which thus appears in absentia in the sentence, the word “architect” (or “architekton,” the master-builder), rather than Sir Thomas Deane, evokes Joyce himself, the writer remaining “behind or beyond or above his handiwork” (P 215), while the tidied-up version of his plans, the Linati and Gorman–Gilbert schemata, were being circulated, looking a lot tidier than the actual plans— the notebooks, drafts, and prints—from which the literary monument was in fact erected. In spite of this metaphorical and implicitly intertextual application of the word, most readers would nevertheless spontaneously agree that architecture does receive a very concrete treatment in Ulysses. How this is achieved is a question that may get a fi rst answer through a closer reading of the last lines in “Lestrygonians.” When Bloom considers the museum façade, he uses the phrase “cream curves of stone” (U 8.1180), an account of the building which, if one is acquainted with it, seems rather inadequate. However, the phrase becomes clearer when connected to an earlier mention in “Lestrygonians” when Bloom evokes the beauty of curves. But in this fi rst instance he was not so much qualifying the architectural curves of the museum building as those of the “shapely goddesses” standing naked in the round entrance hall (U 8.920–922).8 Therefore when Joyce later writes that Bloom, looking “steadfastly” at the façade, sees “cream curves of stone,” we can safely assume that he is not so much reviewing the neoclassical columns as anticipating the Greek statues within. In “Ithaca,” the mention of the Parthenon is followed by a parenthesis explaining it contains “statues of nude Grecian divinities” (U 17.1984–1985), which further explains why the museum has also become an exemplum of Greek architecture— because, like the Parthenon, it contains statues of naked Greek goddesses.9 Revealingly, Bloom’s appreciation of Greek architecture remains in keeping with his idiosyncratic circumambulatory course: as often, he likes to venture beyond and behind fronts and façades, to go looking inside buildings, just as he also tries to look inside statues, being, as Mulligan aptly puts it, “Greeker than the Greeks” (U 9.614–615). Following his main character’s inclination, Joyce is often most precise when considering buildings from within and through what it feels like to live, stay or move in or across them. As suggested by the so-called curves of the neoclassical Museum façade, the visual perception of a bi-dimensional building front can be supplanted by the memory of a more complex and evolving experience of the interior architectural space driven by sensual appetites. Budgen remarks that, in contrast to Dubliners, there are no “delicate pictorial evocations” in Ulysses, that “it is not by way of description that

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Dublin is created” (69). Instead, places are entered, lived in, and we are made to feel as if we were there. Several senses combine to give us this concrete impression of evolving within an architecture, but it is striking that Budgen adds specifically, “[Dublin] must grow upon us not through our eye and memory, but through the minds of the Dubliners we overhear talking to each other” (71). The remark is striking in its quick dismissal of sight and memory, and in the importance given to the characters’ minds—as transmitters but also as receptors of dialogue. Dublin is conveyed through “overhearing,” by which Budgen probably means that we do not actually hear, or overhear, but read words that resonate in our mind, being transmitted as they are from what our eyes read to our “mind’s ear.” The specificity of language in this respect is constituted by its double nature as something that can be both read and heard, combining the two ineluctable modalities of the visible and the audible; and we know how remarkably audible Joyce’s text can be, even when it is not read aloud. As he will put it in Finnegans Wake, “Do you hear what I’m seeing . . . ?” (FW 193.10). Of all the sensory perceptions contributing to rendering the feel of Dublin’s architecture, hearing is given crucial prominence throughout Ulysses. Characters, and notably Bloom who is our essential mediator throughout the day, always pay considerable attention to sounds and to their nature —to the combination of their loudness, pitch, character, tone, and overtones, but also to their paths and provenances. The fi rst thing Bloom notices as he embarks on his day’s journey is a very specific auditory experience—the bells of St. George’s church tolling the hour. He fi rst perceives “[a] creak and a dark whirr in the air high up,” followed by the sound of the bells transcribed as “Heigho,” and finally “the overtone following through the air,” which he identifies as an interval of “[a] third” (U 4.544–550). The whole notation is remarkably precise, even technical.10 Indeed, throughout Ulysses, Bloom is a privileged resonator for such notations of sound. Probably well trained by his marriage to a professional singer, he seems particularly aware of the least sound wave. Identifying the overtone as a third from the fundamental, as he does here, is certainly a sign that he may have, if not perfect, at least relative pitch. In fact, Budgen mentions that when Joyce was writing “Sirens,” he became very interested in the notion of absolute pitch. Although this could be understood in relation to the piano tuner, the fact that the latter forgets his tuning fork in the Ormond bar—and then goes out of his way to recover it—would appear to mean that he does not have absolute pitch, but rather an absolute need of a tuning fork. Bloom on the other hand, when he first hears the piano in the Ormond, can immediately—and without a tuning fork—tell it has been tuned (U 11.650). The very conspicuous motif of the blind stripling’s cane tapping his way back to the Ormond is not only a clue that he probably lacks perfect pitch; it also provides an illustration of what Dublin’s architecture may sound like when considered acoustically only: “Queer idea of Dublin he must have tapping his way round by the stones” (U 8.1110–1111), Bloom muses after

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helping him across Dawson street. One is of course reminded of Stephen’s experience in the second paragraph of “Proteus,” as he pretends to walk blindly along the strand, tapping his ashplant, and discovering rhythm in the process of privileging auditory perceptions: “Rhythm begins, you see. I hear” (U 3.23). Nevertheless, the sensory perception of the noise made by Stephen’s shoes on the strand (“his boots crush crackling wrack and shell,” U 3.10–11) tends to be supplanted by abstract, conceptual considerations and allusions to philosophers or to Shakespearean characters with a marked philosophical bent, such as Hamlet’s “cliff that beetles o’er his base” (Hamlet 1.4). Whereas Stephen is concerned with the clear-cut distinction of the modalities that determine the perception of reality—visible coexistence in space and audible succession in time, following Lessing’s, and Kant’s, division—Bloom’s considerations favor a more concrete, empathetic approach, as he attempts to imagine what Dublin becomes when perceived exclusively through audition. The subtlety and quality of his sound notations can only heighten his concern and sympathy for the blind stripling. In this respect, it is worth remembering Joyce suffered from myopia, which forced him to see primarily in limited patches, and from attacks of iritis that tended to blur and obscure his entire visual field; eventually glaucoma would further reduce his field of vision.11 It is not altogether surprising to fi nd his main characters imagining what blindness can feel—and sound—like. Equipped with a sensorium wherein sight was progressively more restricted and unreliable, Joyce most certainly had much occasion to reflect on the perception of space by the blind. Himself an amateur musician, and one who had once considered a professional career as a singer, he must have been—somehow like Bloom—knowledgeable enough to make precise, technical notations about the sounds he heard around him. Indeed, Bloom is not the only one to perceive subtle variations of pitch and tone. Throughout Ulysses, characters functioning as echo chambers for architectural acoustics effectively impart to readers detailed information about sounds, voices, and particularly the exterior and interior resonance of dialogues. Starting with Mulligan’s fi rst intonation on Martello tower, the richness and variety of the terminology with which Joyce describes the voices and tones of his dialogues always display the utmost precision. His characters do not only talk, whisper, cry, bawl, laugh or cough; they also grunt or sniff, intone or oracle, groan or purr, screech and squeal, rattle and throb, and of course they can sing and chime in. A whole host of specific adverbs bring additional precision, as each sentence is uttered gravely or gaily, briskly or thickly, contentedly or sourly, softly or sternly, proudly or gently, unmannerly or superpolitely. Joyce almost systematically provides precise notations of pitch, intensity, and tone. If the words are uttered over a clatter of wheels, a clanging tram or a clanking printing press, or if the speaker is wearing creaking shoes, we will also systematically be told: the identification and localization of other, interfering sound sources often becomes part of Joyce’s dialogues. Even when there is no sound, this

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absence tends to be explicitly remarked upon, as if Joyce’s inner acoustic spectrum analyzer could never be completely turned off. In “Oxen of the Sun,” silence is even defi ned as “the infi nite of space” (U 14.1078–1079), as if Joyce’s characters were measuring space entirely through the perception of sound waves. Indeed, the spectrographic quality of Joyce’s imagination is a recurrent and remarkable feature of his writing, one that contributes to defi ning space through precise perceptions of sound and resonance. Joyce’s knowledge of music (which he passed on to many of his characters) obviously influenced his writing. Nevertheless, technical vocabulary is not particularly impressive in this respect: it is generally less striking than the mimetic quality of his language. Freeing himself from the usual reservoir of dictionary-approved words, as well as from traditionally accepted grammar and syntax, Joyce often provides the most exact transcriptions of sounds: Stephen’s boots “crush, crack, crick, crick” on the strand in “Proteus” (U 3.19), Molly’s sweet song combines with a train engine whistling in “Penelope” (“frseeeeeeeefronnnng,” U 18.596), and the three transcriptions of the cat mewing for food in the morning in the opening of “Calypso” have always struck cat-owners as eerily accurate (U 4.16, 25, and 32). Phonemes are reorganized at will in order to reproduce the exact acoustics of what a character can hear, often combined with the internal resonance of the sound, such as Molly’s “sweeeetsonnnng” (U 18.598). A striking example is that of the printing press in “Æolus”: the machine is envisaged as a musical instrument, as it “clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump” (U 7.101). As Joyce well knew, music is a sound which can be transcribed: there is a well-established code for it, with a staff on which clefs and notes are placed to indicate pitch, and a complex system of notation to indicate rhythmic succession or simultaneity. A score will in fact appear in the middle of “Ithaca” as Joyce renders the ballad of “Little Harry Hughes and the Jew’s Daughter” (U 17.802–828), and a short medieval staff can also be found in “Scylla and Charybdis” to provide the exact tune of the Gloria (U 9.500). In “Æolus,” Bloom further elaborates on the sound of the press, noting how it is “[a]lmost human,” “[d]oing its level best to speak,” and he concludes, “Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt” (U 7.175–177). This is moving a step further from musical notation: if everything is capable of speech, it thereby follows that everything can be transcribed using language, and therefore printed. Joyce’s onomatopoeic rendition of what Bloom hears (“Sllt”) immediately proves the point, and it is revealing that he chose to make it about a printing press. Conversely, the striking attention to sounds and resonances in the library episode is both a realistic rendering of the place and an implicit comment upon the possible interpenetration of print and acoustics. Onomatopoeias are an extreme transformation of Standard English, whereby sounds are transcribed by coining new words. But Joyce also employs the more traditional techniques of rhetoric, in which he had been well trained, to convey acoustic phenomena. In the “Scylla and Charybdis”

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episode at the library, the least creak will be mentioned, and when Buck Mulligan cries out “cuckoo,” the echo is conveyed by the following trimeter: “Dark dome received, reverbed” (U 9.1026).12 In a very Shakespearean attention to prosody, which is perfectly topical in the context of the discussion on Shakespeare, the two stresses of the fi rst spondee (“dark dome”) are interspaced with unstressed syllables and stretched out into two iambs (“received, reverbed”), where the stress is each time delayed unto the second syllable, and where the two endings in “-ved” and “-bed” allow for the original alliteration in [d] to echo and reverberate in consonance until the end of the line, thus mimicking the echoing phenomenon itself.13 Joyce’s passion for opera can certainly explain his attention to such acoustic phenomena, but his interest in the theater and perhaps particularly in Shakespeare’s theater might go a long way to explain how he came to metrically render the emission of sound, the trajectory of its sound waves, and its effect on the listener. On one occasion in Ulysses, Bloom appears as a particularly efficient expert in musical acoustics, at least if we accept to take his—obviously biased—word for it. In “Lotus Eaters,” he mentions a particularly successful rendering by Molly of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, which he explains fi rst by her being “in fi ne voice” on that occasion, but also by the fact she followed his advice to “pitch” her voice against a particular corner in the church (U 5.397–401). The “thrill in the air” could be felt by the enraptured audience, and Bloom appears as the one who, apart from the original tone and intensity given by Molly, knew how to direct the sound to travel across the room so that it would reflect against a right angle, sending out the proper crisscrossed waves, and thus creating the desired amplitude and reverberation to fill up the air and produce the most efficient impression on listeners. Singing voices and how Bloom overhears and perceives them become the central concern of the “Sirens” episode. And nowhere in Ulysses are Joyce’s rhetorical, linguistic, and prosodic effects more pronounced.14 It is the most acoustically oriented chapter in Ulysses, not only because of its musical technique, but also because the Ormond comprises a music-room: architectural acoustics, technical questions of resonance, noisepaths, and sound coverage thus become essential. The timing of the episode is crucial: four o’clock is the hour announced by Molly for Boylan’s visit, and having spotted him walking in the Ormond, Bloom enters and takes a seat in the dining-room adjacent to the bar, at a table expressly chosen “near the door” (U 11.391–392), with his ear entirely oriented toward the bar. Thus he will notice every creaking shoe, every smacking elastic garter “[s]onn[ant] . . . [l]a cloche” (U 11.411–414), giving still more amplitude and resonance to the coins already ringing and the cash registers clanging in that episode (U 11.371 and 382–383). Bloom is the exact opposite of the deaf waiter: he waits but is all ears. As Joyce compactly puts it, “Bloom bent Leopold ear” (U 11.637). The genetic study of the episode’s composition reveals how Joyce reserved an essential role for Bloom as a sound receptor. As Daniel

62 Valérie Bénéjam Ferrer comments in his description of the fi rst “Sirens” manuscript, Bloom’s arrival in the draft of the episode, his first appearance in a project that did not originally contain him, is an essential moment in Joyce’s preparation for “the orchestration of something much more complex . . . embarking on a polyphonic organization.”15 Bloom’s absolute pitch, together with his careful (and jealous) ear, makes him a plausible and efficient resonator for Joyce’s complex work on noises and voices in the episode. Bloom is therefore the ideal audience for Dedalus, Cowley, and Dollard’s improvised recital, the best man to appreciate the quality of the sound coverage provided. Indeed, questions of interspace sound control, of transmission of sound from one building space to another, become fundamental given the outlay at the Ormond. Bloom is near enough the door to hear what happens in the bar, but the music-room is situated a little further. Like windows, doors are habitual noise paths, which is why Bloom will signal to the waiter to set one ajar so that he can hear Simon’s “Martha” (U 11.670). Ducting and other penetrations are another habitual noise path, which probably explains why, although the kitchen is situated between the music and the dining rooms, Bloom can hear the singing so well: “[s]till, hear it better here than in the bar though farther” (U 11.722–23), he comments, as always very aware of the sound’s provenance and trajectory. Although drawing an exact diagram of the ground floor at the Ormond only from “Sirens” might be a tricky affair, these notations of architectural acoustics, most of the time rendered through Bloom’s hear-point, helpfully complement our understanding of the actual set-up of rooms involved in the episode. Bloom is not only a privileged resonator for the sound coverage of the Ormond, he is also interested in the theory of acoustics, although, as already mentioned, when it comes to scientific matters, accuracy is not his forte. He seems for instance vaguely aware of the mathematical dimension of acoustics: he fi rst explains that all music is but numbers (U 11.830), but then adds such a confusing development that we cannot compute with him very far: “Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always fi nd out this equal to that” (U 11.830–833). In the end, he seems to be condemning the complex calculations of acoustic physicists, when he contrasts the traditional images of musical harmony (“Musemathematics . . . the etherial,” U 11.834–835) with what resembles more recent acoustic equations: “But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat” (U 11.835– 836). Through Bloom’s inner speech, however, and particularly through his remark on chords and vibrations, we sense some knowledge that the pitch of a note depends on the period of its vibration,16 or that there is a connection between musical intervals and defi nite ratios of frequencies.17 Similarly, his musings on chamber music are far from precise acoustical elaborations, and usually remembered for his pun on chamber pot and the

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music made by Molly when urinating.18 Nevertheless, this is when scientific terminology appears in Bloom’s interior monologue: “Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water” (U 11.980–983). Bloom is here confusing Helmholtz’s acoustical principle that the resonance and pitch in vessels change as liquid is added (larger, empty vessels producing lower frequencies), with Archimedes’ law of specific gravity (the ratio of the weight of water displaced by an object to the weight of the object). But the allusion provides some indication that Joyce must have been familiar with these theories.19 Hermann Helmholtz’s famous book on the subject, which influenced musicologists well into the twentieth century, had come out in 1863, and its translation by Alexander J. Ellis, On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, in 1885. 20 While Bloom’s elaborations are not too convincing, his intuitions remain striking, and his ear always most attentive, as proven for instance by his delicate perception of Miss Douce’s smacking garter: “Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable a woman’s warmhosed thigh” (U 11.413–414). As in the library echo, the repetition and variation on stressed syllables—such as “smack” (“smackwarm,” “smackable”) or “warm” (“smackwarm” and “warmhosed”)—perform a rhetorical rendering of the actual resonance. Later we fi nd Bloom playing with a strangely sonorous elastic, as he “with slack fi ngers plucked the slender catgut thong. He drew and plucked. It buzz, it twanged” (U 11.795–796). The last two sentences—a perfect iambic tetrameter—are resumed in a sudden cretic, or amphimacer, foot, as the elastic fi nally snaps: “Twang. It snapped” (U 11.811). Here again, Joyce’s metrical rendering is revealing, but so is the subject he chooses to focus upon, for vibration of strings was the very basis of the sound-waves theory: with such notations, Bloom proves his intuitive understanding of the phenomenon. Whereas Lidwell tartly comments on Miss Douce’s seashell by quoting from the Glover and Carpenter duet (“What are the wild waves saying?” U 11.949), Bloom could have punned, as Finnegans Wake later will, “what are the sound waves saying?” (FW 256.23–24). Miss Douce’s seashell turns out to be more than an artifice of seduction: it is in fact a central acoustical phenomenon in “Sirens.” As it is passed from one customer to another, and as each in turn holds it to his ear, Bloom mentally corrects the common assumption that the shell has retained some magical memory of the sound of the sea (“The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar,” U 11.945). Escaping in the process the seductions of the Sirens’ song, Bloom offers another explanation, which is that what can be heard is the sound of the beating of blood amplified by the shell (“The blood it is,” U 11.945). Although this may sound more scientific, it is just as wrong. The true explanation of this acoustical phenomenon is that in our surroundings, there always exists a certain level of noise. The shell acts as

64 Valérie Bénéjam a resonator amplifying the sound at specific frequencies, which are given by the shell’s dimension and shape. 21 Due to the complicated geometry of shells, the overtones are not multiples of the fundamental frequency. And this mixture of overtones, together with the appearance of rather broad resonances, gives rise to the impression of a nontechnical, natural sound, as from the sea. The noise heard in the seashell in “Sirens” is therefore the noise of the episode itself: all the dialogue, singing, sounds and noises resonate in the shell. Even more than Bloom, it is the true resonator of “Sirens,” or rather its acoustical quality may stand as the symbol for the technique of the whole episode, where the architectural acoustics of the rooms in the Ormond are made to resonate through various characters, Bloom prominent among them. 22 Just like the other resonators, the shell also bears phantasmic overtones, illustrated by its symbolic connection with sexuality: it is repeatedly called a “seahorn” (U 11.34, 924, which echoes Lenehan’s question to Boylan, “Got the horn or what?” U 11.432), and it is, like ears in fact, a traditional symbol for female pudenda. Bloom’s own unconscious and phantasmic overtones resonate for instance in the jingle jaunty motif of Boylan’s outsider, which can be heard making its way up to Molly’s door, although it is actually moving away from the resonating center of the Ormond. Bloom’s phantasmic acoustics being so resounding in “Sirens,” it is no wonder that he interprets the noise in the shell as being that of the blood beat: his own heartbeat is probably accelerating as he fantasizes about Boylan approaching his wife. Indeed, architectural acoustics in Ulysses carries phantasmic overtones and resonances that defy habitual noise paths and traditional physics. It is difficult, not to say impossible, to fi nd out how much Joyce himself knew about physical acoustics, how supported Bloom’s intuitions were by his creator’s actual scientific knowledge, or rather who should be blamed for Bloom’s inaccuracy in this field. My hypothesis here is that Bloom’s mistakes, and particularly his assumptions about the noise produced by a seashell to one’s ear, were perfectly controlled by Joyce. The underlying physics of acoustics had made immense progress in the nineteenth century, primarily with Helmholtz’s theories, which we have detected as the subtext of some of Bloom’s attempts at understanding acoustical phenomena. However, the most famous book on acoustics in Joyce’s time would have been John William Strutt 3rd Baron Rayleigh’s The Theory of Sound, which was fi rst published in 1878. If Joyce had read it, he probably—like many readers in his days—would have focused on the fi rst chapter, which serves as an introduction and makes fairly easy reading. The rest is extremely technical, and to the lay reader, sounds very much like the crazy equations Bloom imagines reciting to Martha. This fi rst chapter also reveals Rayleigh’s strong interest in musical acoustics and does contain, like some of Bloom’s musings, a little accessible mathematics. Rayleigh (1842–1919) was one of the most famous British physicists of his time, so Joyce would

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defi nitely have read about him in the papers, especially with his reception of the Nobel Prize in 1904. This was not actually for his work on acoustics, but for his discovery of a gas called “argon,” which makes up 1 percent of our atmosphere. In Finnegans Wake can be found an explicit mention of argon (“and you may not care for argon”) along with the phrase, “the acoustic and orchidectural management of the tonehall” (FW 165.8–11): the combination of these two allusions, to Rayleigh’s chemical discovery and to architectural acoustics, seems to imply a cryptic reference to the physicist. In context, the quote is even more interesting, coming after a long paragraph about singing and cantatrices, where the unskilled singer is accused of perverting the listener’s ears “by subordinating the space-element, that is to sing, the aria, to the time-factor, which ought to be killed” (FW 164.33–35). The distinction is significant, both philosophically and physically: the division between spatial and temporal arts dated back to the eighteenth century and to Lessing’s Laocoon, which in fact established the dichotomy.23 Apart from Baudelaire, who claimed that music could make us feel space, this dichotomy became widely accepted, as illustrated by Schopenhauer’s pronouncement that “music is perceived in and through time alone, with absolute exclusion of space.”24 Hegel further contended that as soon as it is emitted, sound disappears, offering no resistance in space. Kandinsky and Klee were perhaps the fi rst to contest this division, as they included rhythm in their painting. But, as Bloom’s amateurish remarks prove, musical practice would probably have provided concrete contradiction to the idea of a disappearance of space in music. The phenomenal structure of auditory perception could point one to the spatial condition of sound and music, even before scientific proof was brought in the realms of physics and physiology. This could go a long way to explain Joyce’s interest in acoustic theories that elucidated what he would have sensed intuitively as a singer, musician, and opera amateur—that instead of being nonspatial, music reveals the dynamic depth of space, transforming its structure by fi lling up the air with oscillating particles, and possibly revealing it as a united whole. 25 Rayleigh’s Theory of Sound contains several passages which resonate with Bloom’s musings in “Sirens”: a whole chapter is devoted to the vibrations of strings, and a long passage details Helmholtz’s experiment, involving pouring liquids into vessels and proving a tone is constituted by a periodic vibration through the variation of the vessels’ sizes and the level of liquid in them. Most importantly, the bulk of Rayleigh’s fi rst chapter is concerned with showing how the pitch of a note depends upon the period of its vibration. This is achieved by experimenting with an instrument invented by the French physicist Cagniard de la Tour: it involves a disc, pierced with several holes and revolving round its center, while a windpipe blows puffs of air through these holes, thus producing a note when the disc revolves quickly enough. That this instrument is called a “siren” offers further evidence that Rayleigh’s book was an influence on Joyce’s work, particularly in the thirteenth episode of Ulysses.

66 Valérie Bénéjam However informed or intuitional, Joyce’s use of acoustics stands as a crucial element in his construction of Dublin’s spatial environment: reading “Sirens,” for instance, we can hear “in our mind’s ear” the architectural acoustics of the Ormond, which might even make it possible to visualize the place. Further blurring the so-called ineluctable dichotomy between time and space, thanks to the linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical achievement of his writing, Joyce has succeeded in deriving the “ineluctable modality of the [audible]” (our own interior resonance of his text) from the “ineluctable modality of the visible” (or readable), the language resonating from the printed pages of Ulysses (U 3.1). This may remind us of Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between visual space, which stresses linearity and regularity, and values objectivity, and acoustic space, which engages multiple senses and allows its various parts to co-exist simultaneously. According to McLuhan, acoustic space preexisted visual space, as the primary mode of communication of oral cultures was speech, while print culture is the realm of visual space. 26 Revealingly, he saw modernist writers (Eliot and Joyce most prominent among them) as breaking up visual space through their revolutionary treatment of print. It appears that Joyce’s personal interest in sound and music, combined with his discovery of the scientific bases for his intuitions, played a significant part in this modernist revolution. NOTES 1. “’I want,’ said Joyce, as we were walking down the Universitätsträsse, ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book’.” Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; rpt: 1960), 69. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. I am here referring especially to the work of Ian Gunn, both the remarkably exhaustive and useful book written with Clive Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), as well as the article written with Mark Wright and published in Hypermedia Joyce Studies: “Visualizing Joyce,” HJS 7:1 (2005–2006), http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v7/main/essays. php?essay=gunn (accessed Oct. 2009). 3. The authors of “Visualizing Joyce” are perfectly aware of the limitations of their approach, and careful to present their work as a complement to reading: “Virtual Reality . . . can act as an aid for the visualisations of aspects of Ulysses but is no substitute or competitor for the novel itself . . . Ulysses already is a virtual reality. A virtual reality created with words.” They quote Bernard Benstock’s article “Ulysses Without Dublin,” in which he famously claimed, “Ulysses is no more about Dublin than Moby Dick is about a whale—although no less.” JJQ 10.1 (Fall 1972), 100–101. 4. See Michael Groden, Ulysses in Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 182–184. 5. For all the architectural information on this passage, I am indebted to Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 188.

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6. “Architecturally” is also found in “Nausicaa,” but it ironically applies to Master Tommy and Master Jacky’s efforts to turn their sandcastles into something like Martello Tower (U 13.44). The word is obviously the result of Gerty’s high-flown, ladylike style, and the reference to Martello Tower echoes “Telemachus,” thus contributing to the global architectonic soundness of Ulysses. In “Penelope,” Floey Dillon is mentioned as having married a “rich architect” (U 18.721). The name “Floey Dillon” brings to mind her father, who has already appeared in several instances (in “Hades,” “Sirens,” “Nausicaa,” “Circe,” and “Ithaca”). Such details highlight both the verisimilitude and the crisscrossed references (or master-building) of the book as a whole. 7. Joyce’s remark that he “may have oversystematized Ulysses” was made to Samuel Beckett (JJII 702). 8. In Joyce’s time, the rotunda at the Museum was circled with plaster cast representations of several famous statues of antiquity, among which notably the Venus of Praxiteles. In the center were also three canons, but Bloom seems completely obvious of the fact, just as he neglects to mention the male Greek deities represented in some of these statues. See my article “Stephen and the Venus of Praxiteles: The Backside of Aesthetics,” Cultural Studies of James Joyce, ed. Brandon Kershner (European Joyce Studies 15, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 59–76. See also Fintan Cullen’s “‘Museum With Those Goddesses’: Bloom and the Dublin Plaster Casts,” Dublin James Joyce Journal 2 (2009), 24–38. 9. Pushing the point further, one could contend that Ulysses itself is a perfect example of Greek architecture, since it will display a naked woman when one reaches its inner core, or last episode. 10. It is tempting to compare Joyce and Woolf in this regard: the Big Ben motif in Mrs Dalloway, for instance, is undoubtedly very poetic and delicately rhythmic: “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” Mrs Dalloway (Penguin, 1996), 6. It is definitely less precise or technical, however, than Joyce’s rendering. 11. The fi rst attack of iritis occurred in 1907 in Trieste, followed by new bouts in 1909 and 1915, and as he composed and corrected the text of Ulysses, from 1917 to 1922, Joyce suffered regular episodes of such eye attacks. Roy Gottfried’s Joyce’s Iritis and the Irritated Text: the Dis-Lexic Ulysses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995) offers a particularly detailed review of this impairment, as well as a thought-provoking reading of Joyce’s consequent relation to language and print. 12. I am thankful to Jean Schoonbroodt for having alerted me to this line. 13. The word “reverb” does not in fact exist as a verb (neither did it exist as a noun in Joyce’s time): the shortening of “reverberated” is part of Joyce’s prosodic work on these four words. 14. See Jean-Michel Rabaté’s analysis of the use of classical rhetoric in “Sirens”: “The Silence of the Sirens,” in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja, Phillip F. Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 82–88. 15. Daniel Ferrer, “What Song the Sirens Sang . . . Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture: A Preliminary Description of the New ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens’ Manuscripts,” James Joyce Quarterly 39:1 (Fall 2001), 59–60. 16. 440 complete vibrations per second for A, for example. 17. The frequency of vibration is doubled between a note and its octave, multiplied by five-fourths (1.25) for a third, three halves (1.5) for a fifth, and so on. 18. This will be echoed in “Penelope,” but also reflects on Joyce’s collection of poems, Chamber Music.

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19. The theory is also behind Molly’s pun on Ben Dollard’s “base barreltone,” which is fi rst alluded to in “Lestrygonians” (U 8.117–120), and then again in “Sirens” (U 11.559, 1011), “Circe” (U 15.2609–2610) and “Penelope” (U 18.1285). 20. The German for tone, klang, is interestingly close to some of Joyce’s favorite onomatopoeic verbs for acoustic rendition: clanging and clanking. On Joyce’s use of Helmholtz, see also Vike Martina Plock’s “Good Vibrations: ‘Sirens,’ Soundscapes, and Physiology,” JJQ 46:3–4 (Spring–Summer 2009): 481–496. 21. If you try exercising before putting a shell to your ear, you will fi nd that your accelerated pulse does not produce a different sound, as it should if the blood beat were the origin of the sound. Besides, when the outside is quiet, instead of hearing the sound of the sea clearer, the opposite is true. In a soundproof room, you hear nothing when you put a shell to your ear. 22. I am thankful to Daniel Ferrer for confi rming in conversation that there is no shell—not even the image of the shell on the mirror—in the fi rst draft of “Sirens” that did not contain Bloom: the shell is not part of the fi rst half of the draft, and it only appears when Bloom does, in the second half. Ferrer also mentioned a later correction whereby “lard” is replaced by “shell” in the phrase “shell out the dibs” (U 11.1077), thus proving that Joyce retrospectively added other mentions of the word. 23. The reflections about space and music which follow, in relation to aesthetics but also to the phenomenological perception of music and to the spatial organization of orchestras, have been inspired by a remarkable collection of articles on the subject in L’Espace: Musique / Philosophie, ed. Jean-Marc Chouvel and Makis Solomos (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). 24. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. I, tr. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1910), 344. 25. The scientific progress in acoustics was paralleled by the evolution of the spatial organization of orchestras. Joyce’s interest in Malher, or even more pointedly, in Wagner’s music, would have alerted him to this, as both composers were keenly aware of the effects of sound perspective, and made remarkable changes in the disposition of their orchestras, both in relation to the stage and to the audience. 26. See on this topic both Donald Theall, The Medium Is the Rear Mirror: Understanding McLuhan (Montréal: McGill Queens University Press, 1971), who argues that McLuhan’s use of the terms “visual” and “acoustic” spaces is idiosyncratic, and Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), who argues contra Theall that McLuhan was a rigorous theorist of space.

4

Text and the City Joyce, Dublin, and Colonial Modernity Luke Gibbons

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 1)

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, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. (U 8.484–486, 490–491)

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.”2 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” (381). In this cameo, it is possible to catch a glimpse of Joyce’s attitude to his work as well as to his personal life. For all its universality and cosmopolitanism—the appeals to myth, everyman, and the human condition—Joyce’s writing was ultimately 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. (381)

70 Luke Gibbons 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” (JJII 521), the readers he felt most comfortable with were not always from the academy or the literary world.4 “When any visitors came over from Dublin,” Colum continues, “he would invite them to dinner at a restaurant: he was so happy when any Dubliner understood his work and liked it, especially if he was a non-literary personage.” Once when we were in a café in Montmartre, a Dubliner who recognized my husband [the well-known Irish writer Padraic Colum] came over and spoke to him. He was over in Paris to attend a football match between an Irish and a French team . . . like many Dubliners he was soaked in Ulysses though he made no pretence of literary sophistication. Immediately we knew he was the very type Joyce would like, and I telephoned to ask if we might bring him round. Joyce was alone in his apartment; it was Sunday and the family had gone somewhere. “Bring him right over.” The Dublin citizen was dazzled but he was delighted to come. What particularly fascinated Joyce was that this guest belonged to a family of old Dublin glassmakers, the Pughs, and represented an item he wanted for Finnegans Wake; the careful reader can fi nd it there. He handed a copy of Ulysses to the guest and asked him to read a chapter out loud in the accent of a lower quarter of the city, the Coombe. The visitor produced something that enchanted Joyce and showed that he must have read parts of Ulysses out loud many times and could reproduce the exact low-down accent necessary for this particular episode. Joyce, obviously delighted, felt that here was a simple citizen for whom Ulysses was a national masterpiece. (385–386)5 The importance of Joyce’s visitor, Thomas Pugh, in bringing out the centrality of Ireland to his work did not stop there. When Henri Matisse agreed to illustrate a de-luxe edition of Ulysses in 1934, Joyce requested Pugh to fi nd an illustrated Dublin periodical for the year 1904 to help impart an Irish quality to the images: “[Matisse] knows the French translation very well but has never been in Ireland. I suppose he will do only the human figures but even for that he would perhaps need some guidance . . . If I could have some back numbers (the picture pages only) to show him when I go back to Paris he might be able to conjure up the past better.”6 Matisse ended up bypassing Ulysses altogether and sketching figures from Homer’s Odyssey, a measure of the gap, perhaps, between Joyce’s perception of his own work and its initial critical reception among the avant-garde.7 That Joyce considered Matisse’s “never [having] been in Ireland” an issue raised questions at the outset over the importance of familiarity with Dublin, and Irish culture in general, to his work. It was indeed the realization

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that Ulysses was primarily aimed at native readers that constituted part of the scandal for his fi rst Irish commentators. In his early scabrous review of Ulysses, Shane Leslie suggested 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.8 The acoustic range of Joyce’s readers would extend far beyond the accents of the Coombe, but as Mary Colum attests, Dublin—its inhabitants, its culture, the material substance of the city 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 last paragraph of Finnegans Wake: “Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafi ng” (FW 619.20). Conventional accounts of Joyce’s rise to literary eminence chart a wellworn 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 metropolitan Paris or the cosmopolitan circles of Trieste and Zurich.9 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: “such concessions to the English market,” writes Joseph Kelly, “were inevitable for Irish writers, if they wanted their books to be available in Ireland.”10 Though Joyce’s work—the “nicely polished glass” in which he imagined Irish people “having one good look at themselves”11— was addressed primarily to Irish readers, he was adamant that this did not preclude international audiences: “The second book which I have ready is called Dubliners . . . I do not think that any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world.”12 By insisting on wider vistas in 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 an entry into the world republic of letters. As Seamus Deane suggests, Joyce’s task was preeminently that of the colonial writer: “[T]o 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.“13 Central to Joyce’s mastery in style was a narrative technique, “free indirect discourse,” that had an Irish as well as international provenance, and which was crucial to the project of addressing multiple audiences. Free indirect discourse allows

72 Luke Gibbons an articulation of a character’s voice—an “inner” point of view—from an “external” vantage point and vice versa, a series of narrative positions combining both inside and outside perspectives at the one time. In its constant awareness of what lies outside and beyond, Ulysses constitutes what Umberto Eco termed an “open” as against a “closed” artistic work, that is, a work which requires an explicit engagement with an “outside”—“nontextual” or contextual factors—without which it would be meaningless. For Eco, it is as if Joyce’s later fi ction seeks to the openness of experience itself in its “indefi nite reserve of meanings”: Clearly, the work of James Joyce is a major example of an “open” mode, since it deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world . . . If Joyce does introduce some keys into the text, it is precisely because he wants the work to be read in a certain sense. But this particular “sense” has all the richness of the cosmos itself.14 It is through Dublin that Joyce’s texts open on to the “cosmos,” and it is thus that the unresolved national elements in his work, the pressures placed on his style by the contradictions of Irish experience, lie at the heart of his modernism. In his essay on Ulysses and capitalist modernity, Franco Moretti attributes the “stasis” of Joyce’s novel to “his subjection to English society: for Joyce, it is certainly the only society imaginable.” Moretti then goes on to elaborate: “[I]f the city of Ulysses were the real Dublin of the turn of the century, it would not be the literary image par excellence of the modern metropolis.”15 It is precisely because Ulysses was not circumscribed by London, and drew on energies coalescing in Ireland to challenge the might of the British Empire, that Joyce was in a position to imagine new possibilities of form beyond the dominant versions of British modernism.16 Dublin and Irish culture did not just provide local color to innovations in form which Joyce acquired elsewhere (from the metropolis, Britain, European modernism, the avant-garde, etc.): they were constitutive of his most advanced stylistic achievements.

THE FICTIVE AND THE REAL [Joyce’s] two big books must be the most local in any literature, and I doubt if he really cared much for anybody who was not familiar with Dublin’s streets and ways. (Mary Colum, Life and the Dream, 382)

Ulysses is not about Dublin, as in conventional, mimetic realism: the city, rather, continually breaks through the surface of the text, “the cracked lookingglass” (U 1.146) of a prose style that, in Leo Steinberg’s phrase,

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“let[s] the world in again.”17 As is widely recognized, Joyce’s writing poses particular problems for the reader, for while displaying linguistic virtuosity at every turn, there is still a kind of withholding. Often what is on the page is not as important as what is left out: there is a constant awareness that some “extratextual” matter is required to fi ll in the silences, ellipses, and “multi-storied symbolic forms” that perforate the text.18 Meanings are not always decidable within the work as in nineteenth-century realist fiction, but gesture toward external references, not all of them from other texts but some from local knowledge, popular memory, or street culture, the stuff of everyday life itself in Joyce’s Ireland.19 For some scholars, this is asking too much as it requires abandoning the aesthetic high ground of a literary masterpiece to forage in the byways of a cultural backwater, the Ireland and Dublin of Joyce’s upbringing. Hence, according to Clive Hart and Leo Knuth, Bernard Benstock’s impatient declaration that “Ulysses is no more about Dublin than Moby Dick is about a whale— although no less.” In an attempt to counter the parochial assertions of a number of Irish men who have claimed that a knowledge of their capital is the only key to the mysteries of the novel, Benstock challengingly suggests that “Too much familiarity with Joyce’s Dublin might indeed be dangerous in attempting a balanced reading of Ulysses.”20 It is not so much that “too much familiarity” gets in the way of understanding Ulysses: rather, its achievement consists in rendering precisely what is “too familiar” in prose and, in the process, “defamiliarizing” it through the act of representation. “Everyday insignificance,” wrote Henri Lefebvre, “can only become meaningful when transformed into something other than everyday life”21: it is through the disjunctions of form that the everyday is no longer taken for granted but is exposed to new possibilities in thought and action. The difficulty here is not just the modernist task of representing contingency and spontaneity—how to catch people off guard if they know they are being observed—but the related problem of gaining (aesthetic) access to what are essentially intimate situations. How can a “trivial” everyday incident, whose value derives solely from the fact that people participate in it, be represented to third parties, that is, be represented at all? In his notes on Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experiencing something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is even justifiable to look at something with coldness. 22 This—in a single snapshot, one might say—sums up the literary challenge met by Ulysses. The task confronting Joyce was how to portray the banality

74 Luke Gibbons of everyday life—events of no great importance but meaningful to those who experienced them, if only by virtue of their participation—in a way that was not banal itself: the literary equivalent of Wittgenstein’s “third party” responding to the snapshot with the same involvement as the holiday-goer and his friends. In this case, it is not the “objective” worth of what is represented that matters—the historical significance or information value—but the grounds of representation itself, the texture of the most desultory everyday exchanges. As Georges Perec complained, only half in jest, one of the ironies of the daily newspaper is that it actually ignores daily life, if by that is meant the humdrum realities that are not newsworthy enough to make it into print: The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?23 It is true that by including the ephemera of the press in a modern epic, Ulysses was already gravitating toward the lower end of what makes history happen, incidents or places that would have no significance were it not for their mention in the novel. Yet, by Perec’s standards, even the events noted by newspapers are momentous compared to the lived texture of everyday life. It is these elusive aspects of experience that are caught in the private snapshot cherished by Wittgenstein’s holiday-goer, but unfortunately only make sense to him or his circle. The achievement of Ulysses is to translate this personal intimacy into “objective” form, to render subjective (or intersubjective) experience accessible, in principle, to third parties. “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express),” writes Wittgenstein, “is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” (CV 16e). Ulysses puts words on much of this background, thereby ensuring, paradoxically, that it is no longer mere setting, or what is left unsaid. This is in keeping with Wittgenstein’s own contention that it is by virtue of aesthetic form that what is normally passed over in silence finds expression. When we see the ordinary in its everyday setting, it does not make “the slightest impression on us”; but when it is represented, “so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves . . . surely this would be uncanny and wonderful at the same time” (CV 4e).24 This capacity to render the familiar unfamiliar is one of the striking achievements of art: Only an artist can so represent a thing as to make it appear to us like a work of art . . . A work of art forces us—as one might say—to see

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it in the right perspective but, in the absence of art, the object is just a fragment of nature like any other; we may exalt it through our enthusiasm but that does not give anyone else the right to confront us with it. (CV 4e) Joyce, however, adds another element to the intricate interweaving of art and experience. In Wittgenstein’s formulation, more suitable to the conception of a closed work, artistic form tends to act as a substitute for the real world, obviating any need to experience at fi rst hand what is presented. This is marked contrast to Ulysses: its evocation of Dublin is dependent on, or at least greatly enhanced by, the actual experience of walking the streets and cultivating an in-depth acquaintance with the history and culture of the city. In holding the mirror up to the real world, Wittgenstein is concerned to leave things as they are; in Joyce, the real world is acted on in the very process of representation. Reading Ulysses requires more than a nodding acquaintance with Dublin, but the experience of the city in turn is transformed by its having been “rendered strange” in one of the masterworks of twentieth-century literature. It is for this reason, Wittgenstein writes, “that the very things which are the most obvious may become the hardest to understand” (CV, 17e). Joyce’s mimetic skill did not consist in transcribing what lay fully formed in Irish culture, simply awaiting discovery, for much of the inner lives of his characters lay below the threshold of consciousness. Raymond Williams was one among many commentators who drew attention to the problems of articulation that pervade Ulysses, the richness of the characters’ inner lives standing in stark contrast, at times, with the paucity of their public use of language (an incongruity comically reversed in the “Cyclops” chapter). The eloquence attributed to inner life involves, of course, a certain poetic license for it is not clear that Leopold or Molly Bloom are actually saying these words to themselves, only that they would if they could put words on their experience (Stephen, as his technical vocabulary shows, may be an exception to this). At stake here is the conviction that everything communicable by nonverbal means is, in principle, capable of linguistic and, indeed, public expression, even if it does not always fi nd its way into words. As the German phenomenologist Max Scheler wrote in The Nature of Sympathy, ten years before the publication of Ulysses, The fact is that the articulation of the stream of consciousness and the ascription to it of those specific qualities of vividness which bring certain parts of it into the focus of internal perception, are themselves governed by the potential unities of action and expression (and the physical significance of these), which they are able to induce. 25 Inner speech, no matter how private, is in principle accessible to others, and it is the opening of subjectivity onto intersubjectivity, the ability to communicate

76 Luke Gibbons and establish relationships in a culture stunted by loss and paralysis, that affords such glimpses of hope as are to be found in the pages of Ulysses. It is true that for the most part, people may not have the command of language commensurate with the complexity of their experience and this, for Scheler, is where the aesthetic comes in. Crucially, artistic representation does not involve giving people back what they know already (Alexander Pope’s “What oft was thought/But ne’er so well expressed”) but expanding horizons beyond conventional “frames” or categories of experience: For this reason poets, and all makers of language “having the godgiven power to tell of what they suffer,” fulfill a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognizable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience in this kind. For by creating new forms of expression the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confi ned, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable us to see, for the fi rst time, in our own experience, something that may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries as it were, within that kingdom. It is they who open up new branches and channels in our apprehension of the stream and thereby show us for the fi rst time what we are experiencing. (252–253) Joyce’s characters are having the experiences, but it is Joyce the writer who renders them intelligible, not only giving characters back their inner lives but also acquainting countless readers with hitherto ineffable or unattainable aspects of experience: “That is indeed the mission of true art: not to reproduce what is already given . . . but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed” (252). Writing of the impersonality of artistic method under modernism, Joyce famously pronounced, through the persona of Stephen, that the identity of the artist “refi nes itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak”: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refi ned out of existence, indifferent, paring his fi ngernails” (P 215). Remaining aloof, it is as if the role of artist is simply to record reality, a policy of nonintervention that also extends to the reader who sees the (fictional) world laid out before him like a self-contained cosmos, answering to its own laws of coherence. As Joyce wrote of Ulysses in the early stages of composition, “It is also a sort of encyclopedia. My intention is to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri. Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even create its own technique.”26

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In commending the depiction of life as it is being lived as the supreme feat of mimesis, it is striking that Wittgenstein also envisages this as extending the boundaries of art: But it seems to me that there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than through the work of the artist. Thought has such a way—so I believe—it is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is—observing it from above, in flight. (CV 5e) Wittgenstein’s imaginative fl ight is consistent with his conception of philosophy as a second-order or “meta-discourse” which leaves the world as it is: the aim here is to account for things without recreating them in the image of the observer, or reducing them to other more “fundamental” realities. 27 Hence his imagining of a mode of representation that gives the kind of access to the real world afforded by experience, except at one remove: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing a man who thinks he is unobserved performing some quite simple everyday activity. Let us imagine a theatre: the curtain goes up and we see a man in a room, walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, sitting down, etc. . . . We should be observing something more wonderful than anything a playwright could arrange to be acted or spoken on the stage: life itself. (CV 4) In many ways, this accords with what was perceived as the world of unprocessed experience in Ulysses: life without any mediation, or even representation (were it not for the difficulty of the book): “The effect of this great accomplishment,” wrote one early critic, “is to make the reader feel he is in direct contact with the life presented in the book . . . to present life as it actually is, without prejudice or direct evaluations.”28 It does not follow, however, that the invisibility of the author allows the reader also to stand back, “paring his fi ngernails,” absorbing life in all its complexity without any effort or involvement. Ironically, it is Wittgenstein’s work that is of importance here, for one of his central contributions to the understanding of everyday life was to underline the importance of participating in social practices or what he termed “forms of life.”29 Negotiating everyday experience is a matter of “language embedded in action,” an exercise not of standing back but sharing in the “idiographic and local context[s]” without which language would be unintelligible.30 In anthropology and the social sciences this rules out “the impartial spectator,” the myth that through abstraction and detachment the investigator can uncover the inner life of a society. Access to the ordinary, observing people going about their daily tasks without posing for the camera (as Walter Benjamin described it), 31 only yields understanding for Wittgenstein if there is already a grasp of the social context of these practices—itself the product of a substantial prior engagement with the culture, whether on the observer’s part or through

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acquaintance with other sources. It is in this sense that a grasp of “forms of life”—the “idiographic and local contexts” of Joyce’s Dublin—are indispensable to Ulysses, the constant intrusions of the real, moreover, bringing this material background into the very texture of the novel itself. 32

INCURSIONS OF THE REAL To what extent does Ulysses break new ground in crossing the often heavily patrolled borders between art and actuality? In the heyday of structuralist aesthetics, the autonomy of art was such that an artwork was considered impervious to history, even in the case of overt references to the real world, for instance, historical personages or real people, placenames, topographical descriptions, and so on. In an provocative reading of one of Wordsworth’s most famous loco-descriptive poems, “Yew Trees” (1815), Michael Riffaterre contended that though the actual yew tree—the “pride of Lorton Vale”—can still be identified (and is virtually a sacred shrine for local people), its existence and that of the surrounding landscape has no bearing on Wordsworth’s poem. Place-names recur in the text—“Lorton,” “Borrowdale,” “Glaramara,” not to mention names of historical battles such as “Azincour,” “Crecy,” and “Poictiers”—but they enact purely formal roles: “In fact, any name will do as a placename, so long as grammar introduces it as such and it is italicized. Put dots or an X after a preposition like ‘at’ or before a noun like ‘Valley,’ and you have conventionally but irrefutable localized your story within a setting. Spelling out names only adds to the verisimilitude.”33 In his early response to Dubliners, Ezra Pound held a similar position in relation to Joyce’s use of place-names: He gives us things as they are, not only for Dublin, but for every city. Erase the local names and a few specifically local allusions, and a few historic events of the past, and substitute a few different local names, allusions and events, and these stories could be retold of any town.34 The use of names and places here is to enhance what Roland Barthes terms “a reality effect”35 —an effect that is not dependent on knowledge of the actual places but which lends an air of authenticity to what is being said. As Riffaterre explains, Why should the commentary have to explain the actual historical circumstances the names refer back to? . . . Adding philological information to the text does not enrich it, or demonstrate how rich the associations are, but only obscures what makes for its literariness: namely, that a poem is self-sufficient . . . Associations here do not work from outside history to text, but the other way around. (109)

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There are indeed grounds for questioning whether Wordsworth ever attends to the specificity of the places and people mentioned in his work, or whether they are absorbed merely as imaginative figures in the service of an all-embracing metaphysics of Nature. In a critical response to Riffaterre, Christopher Butler concedes that though Lorton Vale is named in the poem, “the reference to a specific vale is also strictly speaking unnecessary—a general concept of a vale is all we require.”36 Nothing could be further removed from the sense of person and place in Joyce’s fiction. People, streets, and place-names are introduced in all their specificity: local knowledge, popular lore and gossip, personal relationships and networks, awareness of directions, proximity and contiguity. Of course, this is not to say the reader is presented with an avant-garde tourist’s guide or an elaborate fictive treatment of Thom’s Directory: actual people and places, once designated, were rerouted through often vertiginous circuits of meaning in Joyce’s text, each draft and proof providing the pretext (or subtext) for added layers as the book was being prepared for publication. In the case of Wordsworth, as Butler suggests, taking a word out of its original (literal) context and reworking it on a symbolic plane operates largely at a metaphoric level, an unpacking of resemblances and internal connections that also extends to the work’s generalized relationship to reality: we do not need to know the actual vale or Yew tree but roughly what such an English landscape looks like in order to register its meaning. 37 It is not always the case, however, that the original referential level is hollowed out and divested of its specific gravity in the real world. Riffaterre concedes as much when he notes in passing that “names anchor the description solidly in time because of their metonymic function, their ability to stand for a whole complex of associations” (110).38 For Riffaterre, these associations derive from within the text, the semantic field generated by the relations of words within the poem. For Joyce, by contrast, such semantic fields emanate as much from outside the text, the “whole complex of associations” evoked not only by internal resonances but also by real-life personages, sites, and streets that disturb the formal composure of the text.39 For all the organizational unity and rage for order in Joyce’s system building, the constant intrusions of actuality disrupt not only formal unity but ultimately, the deliberations of composition itself in a manner that prefigures Robert Rauschenberg’s collages as described by John Cage: “This is not a composition, it is a place where things are, as on a table.”40 In Ulysses, the loss of Molly and Leopold Bloom’s son Rudy at birth haunts the highly wrought fictive world, as does the desire for intimacy and the search for lost parent figures; but the historical shadows thrown by the Great Famine, the Phoenix Park murders in 1882, the death of Parnell, and both the 1798 centenary celebrations and pro-Boer sentiments on the resurgence of nationalism, are no less pervasive, not to mention the desultory real-life actions and events whose inclusion in the text seems warranted by no other reason than that they happened on or around June 16, 1904.41

80 Luke Gibbons In rendering fiction porous to the real world to an unprecedented degree, Joyce’s writing presented readers with difficulties that drew not only on the wellsprings of literary modernism but also the muddy waters of the Liffey, a rather polluted source for a clear stream of consciousness. Though often taken as the signature of Joyce’s style in Ulysses, there is, in fact, little of the pure interiority that defi nes stream of consciousness in the psychic life of Joyce’s characters: the world is too much with them as they set out on their rounds of the city, even those who, like Stephen Dedalus, are given to introspection and flights of the imagination. This is not to say that everyone can be read at face value, and that there is no hiding place for intimacies or confidences. Inscrutability in Ulysses belongs to public as well as private space and has as much to do with secrecy, with obliquity in language and gesture, as with a retreat into the recesses of the mind. The sly civility of speech in Ulysses, the recourse to ambivalence and innuendo in the simplest of exchanges, is in keeping with the everyday opacity of a culture that sought to block surveillance by the colonial state. The irony in the present day, as observed previously, is that it is no longer state officials who express impatience with such linguistic codes but critics impatient with the grounding in local knowledge and the material culture of a city. For Colin McCabe, Joyce’s fictions “are not stories ‘about’ Dublin in the sense that Dublin is an entity understood and referred to outside the text,” but, in fact, it is precisely the proliferation of matter “outside the text” that produces the phenomenon that is Joyce’s Dublin.42 As John Kidd argued in his controversial “The Scandal of Ulysses,” reality checks are central to Joyce’s writing, and in particular Ulysses, “itself an encyclopedia, street directory, dialect dictionary, census, pub guide, ordnance survey, and vade mecum bound up in blue and white wrappers.”43 There is, again, an important proviso: much of this information is sifted through the sensibilities of characters who do not need such guides, and who resist the classificatory systems and organized minds that bring such compendiums together. The associations, memories, and emotions that arise in the minds of Joyce’s characters are prompted by their immersion in their environment, an awareness not always raised to overt expression or self-consciousness. Topography itself may operate at a textual level in Ulysses, as in Kidd’s example of the sequence in “Lotus Eaters” that notes Bloom’s passing by the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company, prompting a chain of associations relating to life in the tropics: “Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness” (U 5.33–34). “Flowers of Idleness” draws on the submerged memory of Byron’s fi rst publication “Hours of Idleness,” but there is no evidence at this stage for a Byronic subtext. As Bloom passes later by the railings of Trinity College, his attention is drawn to the modern-day lotus eaters playing cricket lazily in the sun: “Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Buller broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg” (U 5.558–561).

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In the revised Gabler edition published in 1986—the target of Kidd’s systematic critique—“Buller” is changed to “Culler,” a seemingly minor alteration until we turn to Thom’s Directory (1904), and discover that a Captain Buller did exist, and lived at Byron Lodge, Sutton. This picks up on one of the most powerful motifs in Ulysses, the romantic striving exemplified by Byron and implicit in Bloom’s gift of a copy of Byron’s poems to Molly in their early courting days. It is not just tea and cricket that are preying on Bloom’s mind: it is mourning for the loss of the impulses that fi rst brought him together with Molly.44 The associations are prompted initially by the casual phrase “Flowers of idleness” but the subsequent link to Byron is not established textually but extratextually by an entirely contingent factor: Captain Buller’s (unvoiced) address at Byron Lodge, Sutton. Commentators have frequently noted that, notwithstanding scrupulous topographical accuracy, there is little descriptive writing in Joyce of the kind to be found in travelogues or realist fiction: “Despite the wealth of reference to streets, squares, houses, and public buildings,” write Hart and Knuth, “there is in Ulysses little descriptive writing of the kind commonly associated with novels of the previous century.”45 It is not that the features of buildings are irrelevant: the ambience of the city is fi lled in by what is off the page, that which frequently goes without saying. Though there is a profusion of details, little is obvious, and communication both between characters and with the reader is marked by ellipses, abbreviation, and incompletion. The kind of knowledge at stake in Ulysses is not the “genius of the place” beloved of Romanticism, the local color of “characters” at one with their surroundings, but has more to do with what Foucault described as “subjugated knowledge”: “naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition and scientificity.” So “far from being a general commonsense knowledge,” this is “on the contrary a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it.”46 It is not always clear, moreover, that this submerged knowledge lies readily to hand in guidebooks or directories, or can be reduced to “information,” for this is precisely the kind of cognition that the indeterminacy of the novel—the irreducible elements of chance and contingency—throws into question. As the parodic exactitude of the “Ithaca” section demonstrates, the facts do not speak for themselves: endless information can be amassed about a subject, but the often recondite connections that link the facts to history, place and agency may prove more difficult to discern. What then is the relation of text to history in Ulysses, the aesthetic implications of the actuality that repeatedly forces its way into the text? Does the recourse to the real establish despotism of fact that stabilizes the endless play of the imagination afforded by fiction? It would seem, on the contrary, that factual reportage is no closer to certainty than fiction. Though Joyce’s story “The Dead” affi rms, “Yes, the newspapers were right,” the press in

82 Luke Gibbons Ulysses is more notable for its howlers than for getting it right: “The pink edition extra sporting of the Telegraph tell a graphic lie” (U 16.1232). The mention of “L. Boom,” “M’intosh” and “Stephen Dedalus. B.A.” in the report of Paddy Dignam’s funeral, as well as the scrambled typesetting produced by the momentary distraction of the reporter Joe Hynes, does not inspire confidence in newspapers of record (anymore than it does in the scientific precision of the entire “Ithaca” section of Ulysses). As Aristotle pointed out in The Poetics, real life or “history” is the domain of the particular, the contingency of the event, and its introduction at will into a narrative can only unsettle the structural unity of art.47 There is a sense in which fictional characters and events have to be consistent, or at least plausible, in the interests of verisimilitude: this is the realm of poetics, as Aristotle conceived it, or what is now understood as realism.48 No such logic is required of characters or events in the real world: the fact that they did something, or an event happened, is sufficient by itself to lay claim to actuality (if not to world historical importance).49 By introducing actual people and real events in Ulysses, the narrative takes on the haphazard form (and perhaps unreliability) of a newspaper: a collocation of people and events held together by no other logic than that they all happened on the same day. John Cage’s description of the “combines” (collages) of Robert Rauschenberg applies as much to Ulysses as to the newspaper: “[T]here is no more subject in a combine than there is in a page of a newspaper. Each thing that is there is a subject . . . each minute part is at the centre.”50 These are the grounds on which Robert Adams, one of the fi rst to emphasize the value of archival or extratextual research in Joyce criticism, called for a separation of “surfaces from symbols” in Ulysses to counter the distraction posed by real-life allusions to the overall thematic coherence of the work. Hence the need to separate things which were put into the novel because they are social history, local colour, or literal municipal detail, from the things which represent abstract concepts of special import to the patterning of the novel. This is not a clear-cut separation; we may assume that Joyce’s frequent purpose, like Ibsen’s, was to present both a solid surface and a luminous symbol at the same time. But in a book as large and as complicated as Ulysses, it would be inevitable, even if it were not desirable, that one of these purposes should sometimes prevail over the other. When we know what part of the book is mainly literal Dublin detail, we can give more, or at least different, weight to what is palpably symbolic . . . we need fewer symbolic uses for the name [of a real person] because it is better accounted for as fact . . . [sometimes] as a very simple fact indeed.51 But as Adams himself concedes, the surface tension of fact is never entirely dissociated from symbol, and the inclusion of a literal detail may generate a tangential narrative of its own, often not fully motivated by,

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or contained within, the text (“each minute part is at the centre”). The difficulty here lies not only in detecting that such narratives exist, but also concerns the limits of detective work itself, the anxiety that the networks of public knowledge Ulysses draws on may often be as inscrutable as the secrecy of the home, personal intimacy, or the innermost recesses of the mind. In his account of modernist literary language, Derek Attridge contrasts Joyce’s innovations with the more prominent currents in modernism that “stake a claim against time and chance,” looking to the artwork to wrest “necessity from arbitrariness, permanence from the historical flux, universality from the culturally specific detail.” In the latter case, the modernist ideal aspires to a self-sufficient work impervious to context: [The work] does not willingly interact with the concrete situation in which text and interpreter fi nd themselves. Though meaning may be suspended, everything in the text is presented as self-justified. . . . Think of the superb certainty of a Mondrian painting, the self-authenticating power of a Mies building, the assured self-validation of every note of a Schoenberg twelve-tone composition. 52 Joyce’s achievement works in the opposite direction, frequently placing the entire architecture of his work at the mercy of context and circumstance. Though much of the historical scholarship brought to bear on Joyce’s texts is a kind of detective work, undertaken “in the name of greater fi xity, permanence and truth,” this is vitiated by the role of chance, digression, and coincidence in establishing patterns and crossconnections within the narrative. The opposition between “intended” and “accidental” readings breaks down since Joyce’s system building is designed precisely to allow for “unforeseen connections” and interpretations “that defy all predictability and programming.” Though the potential for new, unexpected readings is attributed by Attridge to the different cultural contexts which shape the reader’s experience, the grounds for such active responses are laid by a narrative structure in which gaps and lacunae have already perforated the work: “[T]he distinction between what is inside and what is outside the text is precisely what collapses at this moment.”53 In this, Joyce’s practice also parts company not only with the self-sufficient modernist work but also with the classic realism of historical fiction. Real-life individuals such as Napoleon feature in historical novels, as they do in Ulysses, but no sooner are they transferred to a narrative than they become, in Ann Rigney’s words, “parts of a unified, autonomous fictitious system that stands en bloc at a distance from the world as we know it”: Although particular story elements (“Napoleon” or “Dublin”) may originally have referred to things in the real world, then, their occurrence within the context of a story means that this reference is

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Luke Gibbons suspended: they become part of a fictional world that, as a whole, has no counterpart in the actual one.54

In marked contrast, the introduction of Dublin and real-life individuals in Joyce’s work is to suspend the distinction between fact and fiction itself, bringing text and context into new kaleidoscopic relationships with each other. In the “Eumaeus” chapter, Bloom takes to “Sherlockholmesing” (U 16.831) the old seadog Murphy in an attempt to establish the truth of his tall tales, but in fact the half-baked truths that circulate as knowledge throughout Ulysses militate against detective work—including, one might add, the kind of forensic research on the part of critics that might be expected to clear up the irresolvable ambiguities of the chapter. “My dear fellow,” says Holmes to Watson in one of Conan Doyle’s stories, “if we could fly out that great window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on . . . ”—then the truth would lie exposed in all its candor. This accords with Wittgenstein’s godlike view that leaves the world as it is, but instead of letting people get on with their lives, oblivious to the spectator, it exposes them to the ultimate fantasy of power—in Franco Moretti’s words, “the totalitarian aspiration towards a transparent society.”55 The reduction of reading to the search for clues, the solution of riddle or gaps in information, militates against the questioning of the authority of facts and positivist approaches to knowledge that runs throughout Ulysses. The meticulous concern with accuracy, and the interpolation of real people, places, and events in the action, belie the paradox that the introduction of actuality into the work disrupts internal coherence, ruling out any possibility of his fictive world functioning as a “closed” aesthetic system.56 We cannot be sure what aspects of the real world matter in the text: those that are explicitly mentioned or that come to light elsewhere, whether in the archive or through other chance discoveries. Hence the Borgesian concept of “a labyrinth without a centre,” an endless array of codes, schema, and interconnections but without a master key to make sense of it all. “If you take away the transcendent God from the symbolic world of the Middle Ages,” wrote Umberto Eco, “you have the world of Joyce.”57 The same lack of authority applies to the circulation of local knowledge in Ulysses, notwithstanding its deep grounding in the inner life of the city. There is no romantic sense of place or, still less, an appeal to the native informant, the mythic Dubliner inhaling knowledge along with the smell of the Liffey and Guinness’s brewery. The kind of knowledge at stake in Ulysses has more to do with characters at odds with their environment, not always in a position to come to terms with colonial modernity or, for all their ways with words, raise it to the level of consciousness. When the conversation turns in the cabman’s shelter (as it does several times) in “Eumeaus” to the traumatic memory of Parnell’s downfall, Bloom, we are told, was “incensed” by “the blatant jokes of the cabman and so on who

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passed it all off as a jest, laughing immoderately, pretending to understand everything, the why and the wherefore, and in reality not knowing their own minds” (U 16.1529–1532). This was indeed a symptom of “the gratefully oppressed,”58 a divided city whose population turned out in its thousands for the 1798 centenary commemorations in 1898, and, in a volte face, took to the streets again for the visit of Queen Victoria in 1900. When The Freeman’s Journal wrote of Joyce in its review of Portrait, “What he sees he can reproduce in words with a precision as rare as it is subtle,” it failed to grasp that Joyce is not reproducing but recreating his city: the real is not already there but is awaiting realization through the language of the artist.59 “I go . . . to forge in the smithy of my soul,” wrote Stephen Dedalus, “the uncreated conscience of my race” (P 252–253). By transforming the paralysis of colonialism into new circuits of knowledge and radically different conditions of reading, Joyce was giving Dubliners a self-image in which they not only could see themselves but encounter readers the world over for generations to come. NOTES 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 18, trans. G. E. M Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 8e. 2. Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (London: Macmillan, 1947), 381. Subsequent references in parentheses in text. 3. Joyce joked that the ceaseless flow of the Liffey could extend as far as Trieste, making it the longest river in the world. James Joyce to Ettore Schmitz, 21 November, 1925 (Letters III 133). 4. For recent discussions of this aspect of Joyce, see Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us (London: Faber, 2009) and Julie Sloan Brannon, Who Reads Ulysses? The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003). 5. Joyce’s Dublin visitor, Thomas W. Pugh, belonged to the skilled glass-making family that forged glassware purporting to belong to the Irish Volunteers. Pugh’s glass features on HCE’s coffi n in Finnegans Wake: “The teak coffi n, Pughglasspanelfitted, feets to the east, was to turn in later, and pitly patly near the porpus, materially effecting the cause” (FW 76.11–13). See also FW 349.3 and 350.17. 6. James Joyce to T. W. Pugh, 6 August 1934 (Letters III 314). Joyce also requested Pugh to forward him photographs of key locations in Ulysses for a circular devised by the American publishers of the book: “I remember Kiernan’s but he [the publisher] would also like to have the Martello Tower (Sandycove), Holles Street Hospital and the view of the Strand at Sandymount showing the Star of the Sea Church.” Though clearly designed for promotional use, Joyce’s eagerness conveys a sense of the importance he attached to an acquaintance with the locations of Ulysses. 7. James Joyce, Ulysses, illustrated and signed by Henri Matisse (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1934). 8. Shane Leslie, “Review of Ulysses,” Quarterly Review 238 (October 1922), cited in Herbert Gorman, James Joyce: A Defi nitive Biography (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1949), 295–296 (part of the quotation is omitted in the reprint of Leslie’s review in Robert H. Deming ed., James Joyce:

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

The Critical Heritage I [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970]). Leslie is perhaps suggesting that because of their subsequent importance in political life, figures like Griffith do not present the problem posed to the non-Irish reader by the lesser luminaries walking the streets of Dublin in the novel. As Roy Gottfried—to cite just one example—summarizes it, referring to Joyce’s cosmopolitan literary readership: this “audience was more sophisticated, more able to see the work in a broader context . . . It was not Catholic and parochial but secular and prominent, not Irish but international; not those who shared Joyce’s past but those who shared his present profession . . . It had wider horizons than those of religion, as these readers are part of an aesthetic view that spurned nationalism and parochialism in its allegiance to modernism.” Roy Gottfried, “The Audiences for Joyce’s Autobiographies,” in Joyce’s Audiences, ed. John Nash (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 80. Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (Austin: University of Texas, 1998), 16. James Joyce to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906 (Letters I 64). Joyce to Richards, 15 October 1905 (Letters II 122, italics mine). Joyce’s determination—or anxieties—on this score are evident in his further remark to Richards that his autobiographical novel, though “a thousand pages,” has “the defect of being about Ireland” (Letters II 132). Seamus Deane et al., “Political Perspectives on Joyce’s Work,” in Joyce & Paris 1902 . . . 1920–1940 . . . 1975, Volume 2, ed. J. Aubert and M. Jolas (Lille/Paris: Publications de l’Université de Lille III/Editions du CNRS, 1979), 106–107. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 10. Franco Moretti, “The Long Goodbye: Ulysses and the End of Liberal Capitalism,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983), 190, 189. Though inspired by the Revival, the epic scale of Joyce’s modernism clearly reaches beyond the limited horizons of Celticism, Catholic nationalism and Home Rule, and had more in keeping with the secular and international elements led by socialist and republican radicals. For a discussion of the advanced nationalist milieu in which Joyce circulated, see my section “Constructing the Canon” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing ii, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry/London: Field Day/Faber, 1991). Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 90. Steinberg is referring to the collages of Robert Rauschenberg in terms, as he later points out, derived from Freud and James Joyce (320). Philip F. Herring, Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). For Herring, this strategy is signaled by Joyce’s use of the term “gnomon,” the missing piece of a geometrical figure, in the opening paragraph of the fi rst story in Dubliners, “The Sisters”: “‘Gnomonic’ language may contain ellipses, hiatuses in meaning, significant silences, empty and ritualistic dialogue . . . In effect, a gnomon may be a key synecdoche of absence, part of a general rhetoric of silence within a larger framework of language” (4). The linking of Joyce’s “gnomonic” strategies (in Herring’s terms, n. 18) to elusive local knowledge was already flagged by reviewers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1917: “Parts of the book are perhaps a little too allusive to be readily understood by the English reader. On 265–266, there is an account of what happened at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, when the

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21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

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Countless Cathleen, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, was put on, but the fact is darkly hidden.” Unsigned Review, Everyman, 23 February 1917, in Deming, Critical Heritage, 85. Clive Hart and Leo Knuth, “Applied Thomism” in A Topographical Guide to Ulysses (Colchester: A Wakes Newslitter Press, 1981), 18. For Benstock’s original article, see Bernard Benstock, “Ulysses Without Dublin,” JJQ 10.1 (Fall 1972), 100–101. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 98. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 6–7. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text. Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” [1973], trans. John Sturrock, in Ben Highmore ed., The Everyday Life Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 177. Wittgenstein’s remark is borne out by Yeats’ attempt to bring plays in dialect to natives audiences in the west of Ireland: “Some countrymen in Galway, whither we carried our plays in dialect a few weeks ago, said it was no use going to see them because they showed people that could be seen on the road every day.” W. B. Yeats, “First Principles” [Samhain 1908], in Explorations (Macmillan: New York, 1989), 231. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy [1912], trans. Peter Heath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 252 (second italics mine). Subsequent references in text. James Joyce to Carlo Linati, 21 September, 1920 (Letters I 146–147), cited in Eco, The Open Work, 32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 126. Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 15. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 19, 23, 174; Newton Garver, This Complicated Form of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994). Norman Malcolm, Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 212; Nigel Pleasants, Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar (London: Routledge, 1999), 49. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in One-Way Street (London: New Left Books, 1979), 248–289. It is in this sense that Hugh Kenner interprets David Hayman’s figure of the narrator as an “Arranger” in Joyce: “not the ‘impersonal’ author called for by Dedalian and Eliotic theory but an active participant in the shaping of the text, as vividly present often as any character.” Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), 172, discussing David Hayman, Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). The active arranging produced by multiple narrators extends also to active readers, who are required to bring both textual and extratextual factors to bear on the novel. Michael Riffaterre, “Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry: A Reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Yew Trees,’” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 109. Subsequent references in parentheses in text. Ezra Pound, “Dubliners and Mr. James Joyce” (Egoist, i. no. 14, 15 July, 1914), in Deming, ed., Critical Heritage, 67. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” trans. Richard Howard, in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). As Riffaterre

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36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

Luke Gibbons states: “The text builds up a phantasm of history. Shift the sentence from general to particular, from nouns to names, and in terms of time or space you create an effect of reality” (109, my italics). Christopher Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction and Ideology: An Introduction to Some Current Issues in Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 48. Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction and Ideology, 50–53. Compare with Joyce’s method in Ulysses, as noted by Hart and Knuth (16), where the kinds of imprecision that surface at times in Dubliners—for example, the vagueness of “a little cakeshop near the Parkgate” in “Clay”—no longer feature in the text. At stake here may be a version of Roman Jakobson’s influential suggestion that poetry gravitates toward metaphor while prose fiction, particularly realism, turns on metonymy: “Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realistic author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time.” Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 91–92. It is striking that Riffaterre sees the aesthetic work, in which the “message” is constituted by form or internal properties, as generating its own context: “the appropriate language of reference is selected from the message, the context is reconstituted from the message.” Michael Riffaterre, “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats,’” in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 202. Of course, it is the textual effects of Ulysses that send the reader to Thom’s Directory: but the context is not decidable solely within the text. For a valuable discussion of Jakobson and Riffaterre in this respect, see Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 12–40. John Cage, Silences: Lecture and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 99. It is not, moreover, that events of historical importance are severed from quotidian realities: Joyce’s method in Ulysses is to link the two, as in Bloom’s return of Parnell’s hat to the leader in the fracas outside the United Ireland offices in 1891. In this instance, a real-life event—left open by the anonymity accorded to the actual individual who lifted the hat in the account of the incident in Barry O’Brien’s Life of Parnell (1898)—is exploited for fictional effect. Colin McCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1978), 28–29. As Clive Hart and Leo Knuth point out, in parts of Ulysses “the text is not entirely self-sufficient, the sense is by no means fully determined by the words alone . . . The topography of Dublin is ‘on the page’ at least as much as are the meanings of the words ‘priest,’ ‘kidney,’ or ‘ineluctable modality’: it is part of the book’s primary reference system, without which its full sense cannot be comprehended.” Hart and Knuth, Topographical Guide, 18. The irony here is that the resonance of these topographical details often derives from their being off the page, while being no less part of the text’s meaning. John Kidd, “The Scandal of Ulysses,” New York Review of Books, 30 June 1988. The links between Byron and Trinity are further enhanced when, on bringing Stephen home to Eccles Street, Molly warms to his Byronic looks and wonders did he tell Bloom “he was out of Trinity college” (U 18.1331–1332). Hart and Knuth, Topographical Guide, 19.

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46. Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 82. For an insightful application of this concept to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, see Carol Shloss, “Molly’s Resistance to the Union: Marriage and Colonialism in Dublin, 1904,” in Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies, ed. Richard Pearce (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 105–118. 47. Aristotle, The Poetics, trans S. H. Butcher, part viii (New York: Dover) 17: “It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. . . . The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” 48. This is not to rule out the possibility that chance and indeterminacy may also feature in the seemingly closed world of a fictive text. Elements of uncertainty pervade the lives of the fictional characters in Ulysses: how many lovers has Molly had? Who is the man in the Macintosh? Notwithstanding the unpredictability of fictional characters, even surprises or sudden reversals have to be plausible in the end, and justified on internal textual grounds. As Hugh Kenner famously pointed out, however, Joyce’s development of character and fictional action constantly leaves gaps that are very difficult to account for solely within the text. Hugh Kenner, “The Rhetoric of Silence,” James Joyce Quarterly 14:4 (Summer 1977), 382–394. For extended discussions, see Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) and D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 49. This is the basis of Shane Leslie’s complaint that Ulysses in peopled with real-life nonentities, not important individuals such as Arthur Griffith. In the eyes of Wittgenstein or Georges Perec, by contrast, it is the depiction of the inconsequential that poses the greatest challenge to artistic representation. 50. John Cage, Silences, 101. Cage’s aesthetic is related to the advanced modernist strategy of “autonomization,” as described by Fredric Jameson, according to which parts of a composition become autonomous “centres,” disaggregating narrative cohesion throughout the work. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 2000), 43–51. 51. Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), xvii. 52. Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119. 53. Ibid., 120–121. 54. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 17–18. 55. Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity” (1891), cited in Moretti, “Clues,” in Signs Taken for Wonders, 136. 56. Though Philip Herring writes that Joyce’s “dedication to factual accuracy [is] in confl ict with his uncertainty principle,” elsewhere he argues more persuasively that “the attempt to solve an unsolvable problem with historical evidence and rigorous scholarship” should only do with ‘an awareness that this leads us into indeterminacy.’ Philip F. Herring, Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 117, 108.

90 Luke Gibbons 57. Umberto Eco, The Middle Ages of James Joyce: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, trans. Ellen Esrock (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 7. 58. James Joyce, “After the Race” (D 42). 59. “A Dyspeptic Portrait,” Freeman’s Journal, 7 April 1917, in Deming, Joyce: The Critical Heritage I, 98.

5

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin The Fabricated Cityscape of “The Dead” Liam Lanigan

In Dubliners, the city appears architectonically to dominate the lives of its inhabitants, whose conscious agency is repeatedly revealed to be subordinate to the requirements of the city as a rationally integrated system. The book’s narrative techniques both underscore this dominance and enable us to empathize with the inability of the characters to comprehend the pressure it exerts on their lives. In “The Dead,” however, perhaps because of the indeterminacy of his sociocultural identity, Gabriel Conroy conceives of the city, like Roland Barthes, as “a discourse” spoken by traversing and inhabiting it, rather than, like Le Corbusier, as a mechanism for exerting an immediate grasp on its citizens and their behavior. This chapter will examine the ways in which the story therefore appears to interrogate the conception of the cityscape as an integrative system, by appropriating and reorganizing its ideological signifiers, such as political monuments, in ways which are at odds with that systematization. However, it will also investigate the social, cultural, and historical assumptions Gabriel makes about the cityscape that enable him to reappropriate the city’s signifying content so selectively.

THE ARCHITECTONIC CITY OF DUBLINERS During Little Chandler’s brisk walk to meet his friend Gallaher at the beginning of “A Little Cloud,” he perceives and experiences the city, like other characters in Dubliners, in a way that symptomatically reveals a huge amount about the relationship of these characters to the city as a lived space. Describing the wealthy customers who normally frequent the bar where Chandler will meet Gallaher, we are told, He had always passed without turning his head to look. It was his habit to walk swiftly in the street even by day and whenever he found himself in the city late at night he hurried on his way apprehensively and excitedly. Sometimes, however, he courted the causes of his fear. He chose the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked boldly

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Liam Lanigan forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering silent figures troubled him; and at times a sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf. (D 72)

Chandler takes little cognizance of his surroundings, and the city’s darkened streets instill in him a habitual sense of fear and alienation. His lack of curiosity reflects a more general inability among the book’s characters to fabricate their own ‘readings’ of the city based on the free interpretation of the world around them. In fact, the city itself appears here to determine his physical and emotional activities (“the causes of his fear”). Chandler’s experience of the city neatly reflects the impact of rationalistic urban planning on the inhabitants of many turn-of-the-century cities. The ideological coordinates for urban planning, which emerged out of the same set of anxieties about the effects of modernity on Western civilization that motivated many modernist authors, are summed up and receive their most eloquent elucidation in The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning written by the architect Le Corbusier.1 In it, Le Corbusier outlines his plan for the total restructuring of the center of Paris along what he considers to be rational lines. This was to involve the demolition of most of the city center. In its place would be built a series of huge tower blocks, each vast in height and surrounded by large areas of green space. The streets would be replaced by extremely broad and rigidly straight roads built on a strict gridiron system, reflecting an equation between aesthetic and moral order. Specifically, he sees the city as a means for the dissemination of centralized authority, through which order necessarily flows. The capacity for unilateral action, he argues, affords a very real civic benefit, by providing “unity and coherence” to the cityscape (72). Through urban planning, the chaotic crowd by which the modern city is largely defi ned can be ordered. This Le Corbusier summed up in his maxim “architecture or revolution!”2 For Le Corbusier, the central issue was not how one could alter the city to make its citizens happier, but rather how one could make the citizen more apt to function harmoniously within the city as an ordered system. Le Corbusier regarded the geometrical city as more “moral” than a haphazardly designed streetscape. The straight line and the right angle became for him the principle tools of urban design because they were suggestive of moral rectitude and rational behavior. Indeed, Le Corbusier believed that such behavior could be instilled in a city’s inhabitants by their being compelled to walk along geometrically designed streets. The geometrical city acted as the agent of this process of human behavioral adaptation, allowing the inhabitants’ actions and thoughts to be “dictated” to them (23). “Man is free,” he says, when human creation is “removed from our immediate grasp” (28). Thus the city becomes a “work of art” (29), the end point in a process that abstracts human creative energy and channels it into the greater good of the cityscape. Le Corbusier does not see any difficulty in regarding the city as an artwork to which human needs are subordinated

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 93 and which fi nds its perfection in its removal from the “immediate grasp” of its inhabitants. Urban planning, as Le Corbusier conceived of it, regards itself as an end, and fi nds its expression in the streetscape, whose meaning and function are systematically abstracted from the citizen’s experience. Urban planning, particularly in the early twentieth century, was inextricably bound up in this rationalistic pursuit of human perfection, and its logic is also frequently synonymous with that of mechanization itself. It draws upon an integrative logic in which the agency of the individual is subordinated to that of the city as a singular system. It is for this reason that Richard Sennett suspects the tendency among urban planners such as Le Corbusier to draw an analogy between a functioning city and the human body. For Sennett, the analogy posits a generic human form, usually male, which excludes those whose bodies, or minds, do not accord with that singular, integrative vision for the city, so central to the operation of power.3 Regarding power as the manufacture of social coherence and stability has been at the center of many recent theories of modernity. Modernity, in this instance, is understood as a reorganization of the social network following what Edward Said has described as the breakdown of “fi liative” relations—familial and close communal associations through which, in premodern society, the individual is incorporated into his or her social world.4 As a set of responses to this phenomenon, he traces the development of a tradition, from T. S. Eliot onward, which prescribes “horizontal” or institutional affiliation, which is to say the incorporation of people into the social world through the organs of state and religious authority, in the absence of close familial incorporation. In this formulation, culture becomes a mechanism for the dissemination of a discourse through which authority occludes all those social modes, cultural practices, aesthetic codes, political motivations, and, importantly, historical narratives and myths deemed to be incommensurate with modernity. David Lloyd uses the term “non-modern” to describe “a set of spaces that emerge out of kilter with modernity but none the less in a dynamic relation to it.”5 Engaged in the systemic repression of all such nonmodern phenomena, culture can be regarded as a structural principle that enables the fabrication of modernity, forming through a process of selection and exclusion a narrative that is linear and seemingly inevitable, a “singular modernity” in Fredric Jameson’s phrase.6 The city, defi ned by early twentieth-century planners as a mechanistically integrated system, is thus a vital agent for modernity as Lloyd defi nes it.7 Graeme Gilloch writes that for Walter Benjamin “the urban complex is the quintessential site of modernity,” in its encapsulation of the characteristic features of modern social and economic structures.8 Its buildings, spaces, and monuments both respond to and shape human social interaction.9 As the physical manifestation of modern socioeconomic forces, the city becomes also their main agent, an abstract unifying mechanism beyond the perceptual capacity of the individual. In architectural terms, the

94 Liam Lanigan city usurps the individual’s ability to freely “read” her surroundings based on the accumulation of sensory impressions. The sense of alienation Chandler feels can be regarded as his reaction to the city as an abstract organizational system to which he has no perceptual access, but which nonetheless determines his behavior and emotional life. In many ways, Joyce’s Dublin reflected the aesthetic and ideological prejudices common to most major European cities of the time, as demonstrated by the foundation of the Commissioners for Making Wide and Convenient Ways, Streets and Passages (commonly called the Wide Streets Commission or WSC), which had been inaugurated by Act of Parliament in 1757. An 1802 entry into the minutes of the Commission reflects its bias toward the concerns of official authority, claiming that they have “successfully promoted Order, Uniformity and Convenience.”10 Edel Sheridan argues that the changes made to the cityscape by the WSC “not only provided new vistas and a wider overview of the city but also facilitated surveillance or supervision of people on the streets.”11 While the WSC was constrained by matters of local contingency and political influence from exercising an autocratic control over the development of the city, what powers it had were exerted in accordance with the aesthetic demands of the state, and in this respect it was an important precursor of the nineteenth-century projects of figures like John Nash in London and Baron Haussmann in Paris, drawing upon the aesthetic principles of Enlightenment Europe to impose order on the city’s population.12 What we might thus regard as evidence of Dublin’s proto-modernity must be tempered by recognition of the extent to which the Commission’s projects were influenced by the colonizing mentality. For example the competition to design the Royal Exchange, which was, in the end, the termination point of the new Parliament Street, “was intended to secure a design from an English architect versed in all the latest neo-classical fashion.”13 Its lasting effect, inevitably, was to confirm the inferiority of local architects. The Custom House was to be designed by William Chambers, a man very close to the king, who in his Treatise on Civil Architecture had drawn a direct connection between neo-classical civic architecture and the dignity of the state.14 The design of Dublin during the eighteenth century rendered it simultaneously a metropolitan hub, its architecture reflecting and integrating its inhabitants into the power system it represented, and also a cityscape defined by its relationship to London, its marginality confirmed by its mimicry of the colonial center. It is the tension between these two identities that gives Dublin what Joseph Valente has called its “metro-colonial” character.15 If the eighteenth-century development of Dublin was intended to reflect its standing as a colonial capital, its fate in the nineteenth century reflected only its retreat from that status. After the Act of Union in 1801, the city was, of course, no longer a capital at all. Because of this there was a sharp decline in the number of influential nobility willing to live in the city. As a result, though Dublin still “wore the mask of a capital” (D 46), it began

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 95 a headlong decline into poverty. The “gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roystered” (D 71–72) became the scene of chronic overcrowding and tremendous poverty.16 Thus tension emerged between the ideals of the Protestant Ascendancy as they are embodied in the architecture of eighteenth-century Dublin, and the overwhelmingly Catholic population who now found themselves occupying that space. The tension between the emergent Catholic classes and the cityscape that reflected an older order plays a vital causal role in the alienation from one’s community that Joyce depicts. Dublin’s development frequently prefigures, often in unsystematic or protean ways, the logic of urban rationalization and integration as it developed from the aesthetic and moral principles of the Enlightenment up to the popularization of modernist theories of urban development and planning in the twentieth century. For all its peripherality, the cityscape about which Joyce wrote must be considered a product of this development, bearing witness to a contest in which constant encounters with urban modernization occluded and erased culturally and historically competing narratives. In terms of the topography of the city, these encounters produced an increasing disparity between the imperial strength suggested by the actual streetscape and the material poverty of its inhabitants. Thus Joseph Brady quotes the city’s Medical Officer of Health, Sir Charles Cameron, speaking to the 1885 Housing Inquiry: Some of the poorest and most decayed streets exist in actual contact with the most fashionable squares and streets. A wretchedly poor population, occupying decayed houses, inhabit the space between St Stephen’s Green and Fitzwilliam Square.17 This incongruity is reflected in “A Little Cloud” in the image of a “horde of grimy children” that “squatted like mice” around Henrietta Street as Chandler picks his way through “that minute vermin-like life” that persists under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions mentioned earlier. The northeastern quadrant of Dublin, once the center of fashionable Ascendancy society, and still boasting an architecture befitting such a role, is ironized by the reality of the poverty Chandler observes, and becomes in consequence the vehicle for his alienation. The book diagnoses the sense of occlusion from modernity of an entire class, one that feels fundamentally detached (even though, in a structural sense, they are not) from the power structures of which the city’s architecture is the outward symbol, and in Dubliners often their only agent. Fredric Jameson has argued that modern architectural theory regards our physical trajectory through a building as a “virtual narrative” which we fulfill through movement.18 In many contemporary buildings (he is discussing the Bonaventure Hotel), he goes on, escalators and travelators replace that movement, thus becoming “reflexive signs and emblems for movement proper.”19

96 Liam Lanigan The narrative stroll is thus symbolized by the actions of the machine. In other words, in the Bonaventure the individual’s capacity to “cognitively map” the surroundings is usurped, and her movement is systemically narrativized so that her perceptual reactions are conditioned by the building itself. However this architectonic impulse is already present in nineteenth-century urban planning. Baron Haussmann’s sweeping alterations to the city of Paris provide an early example of the use of the cityscape to alter the perceptions and behavioral patterns of a city’s residents in order to accommodate them to the social and political realities of modernity. Chandler’s apparent awareness of the architecture by which he is surrounded implies the influence of the urban system upon the behavior and understanding of the character, reflecting the individual character’s partial and fragmentary experience of that system, which is to say, his failure individually to comprehend that experience as a function of a system at all. However, taken within the context of the collection as a whole, each experience of the agency of the streetscape points tantalizingly toward a more holistic ordering mechanism—the city as an integrated system. Deirdre Flynn remarks that the three central figures in “Two Gallants” become “anonymous coins,” stripped of agency over their actions, in an imperial economic system based on the dehumanization of the colonial subject. 20 That system manifests itself physically in the coin to which Corley and Lenehan subordinate their actions, though we as readers can intuit the coin’s metonymic significance as the manifestation of a wider, largely abstract system. The two men do not comprehend its metonymy nor, consequently, the dehumanization they have undergone in its service. Herein lies the dramatic effect of the story, and this metonymic significance can be said to apply also to the topographical features of the city with which the characters interact. David Pierce characterizes it thus: Joyce combines a topographical impression of the city with an interior human landscape. The effect of this is to provide the city with a realistic texture while allowing rapid shifts in perspective from the person as object to the person as subject.21 Owing to this complex mode of physical representation, the existence of a unifying and controlling social, political, or moral apparatus is always implied. However without any identifiably ‘omniscient’ narrative structure which might stand for this apparatus, we share with the characters an inability to access it in its totality.22 To return to “A Little Cloud,” David Pierce argues that “Chandler’s passage from the King’s Inns through the streets of his native city is a recapitulation of Ireland’s decline.”23 The departed nobility of Dublin are a reminder, by their very absence, of the political and economic marginalization of Dublin during the nineteenth century, during which time London became the power center from which Ireland was increasingly controlled.

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 97 It is unsurprising, therefore, since Dublin’s streetscape determines Little Chandler’s behavior, that during this passage he projects his desire (to be a poet) onto London, about which he is ignorant: “Every step brought him nearer to London, farther from his own sober inartistic life” (D 73). Disbarred from the possibility of orienting himself within the city, Chandler’s desires are displaced onto the colonial metropolis. We can observe the same type of displacement of desires onto alternative and largely imagined places in many characters in the book, Eveline’s dream of Buenos Aires being the most obvious example. In other words, because of the city’s systemic control over the characters’ lives, those characters must project their desires and ambitions onto an ill-defi ned space that lies outside of the confi nes of Dublin. However those desires are themselves generated by the same set of colonial structures that underscore the ideology of the city’s layout itself, so that the reprojected desires remain carefully circumscribed by the city as an ideological construct. According to our present mode of analysis, in Dubliners the architectonics of the city appear to dominate the behaviour of its inhabitants, whose conscious agency is repeatedly revealed to be subordinate to the requirements of the city as a rationally integrated system. The book’s narrative techniques both underscore this dominance and enable us to empathise with the inability of the characters to comprehend the paralyzing personal, economic, and socio-cultural pressure that it imposes on them.

ROME, THE BURIAL OF HISTORY, AND “THE DEAD” Joyce found his time in Rome, from July 1906 until March 1907, very unpleasant. He described the city as “the stupidest old whore of a town ever I was in” (Letters II 198). This dismissal is reiterated by most critics, usually on the grounds that he wrote so little while there. 24 Despite this, Joyce’s constant complaints about the city, in their frequency and in the constancy of their theme, reveal much about the contribution Rome was to make to the creative tendencies of the author who fi rst conceived of both “The Dead” and Ulysses while living there. The opprobrium Joyce heaped on Rome frequently drew attention to its funereality and the atmosphere of deathliness he detected there. His description of the area around the Forum as “an old cemetery with broken columns of temples and slabs” is typical (Letters II 145). However Joyce’s distaste for Rome seems to some extent to have been generated by its coinciding with a series of creative and fi nancial frustrations, such as the collapse of his agreement with Grant Richards for the publication of Dubliners, his job at a bank in which he was extremely unhappy, and Nora’s second pregnancy. 25 What is more, his specific dissatisfactions with the city converge rather more on Papal Rome than on its ancient ruins, whose grandeur Joyce clearly appreciated. He wrote,

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Liam Lanigan Rome must have been a fi ne city in the time of Caesar. I believe it was chiefly on one or two hills: the inter spaces being used as military exercise-grounds, market-places &c. The forum must have been a magnificent square. But the papal Rome is like the Coombe or old Trieste and the new Ludovisi quarter is like any secondary quarter of a fi ne metropolis. (Letters II 171)

This passage is revealing, since it locates Rome’s problems not in the ruins, but specifically in the city’s modernity, and more presciently, in its relationship to the most pervasive power structure Joyce, at this time at least leaning toward socialism, could identify: the papacy. On another occasion, he excoriates the commercialization of the crumbling remains of ancient Rome: Yesterday I went to see the Forum. I sat down on a stone bench overlooking the ruins. It was hot and sunny. Carriages full of tourists, postcard sellers, medal sellers, photograph sellers. I was so moved that I almost fell asleep and had to rise brusquely. . . . Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse. (Letters II 165) These letters reveal more than simply his revulsion from Rome or its ruins. Although his insight has not commanded much critical attention, Richard Ellmann recognized that in Rome “Joyce became aware of the change in his attitude toward Ireland and so toward the world” (JJII 243): In Rome the obtrusiveness of the dead affected what he thought of Dublin, the equally Catholic city he had abandoned, a city as prehensile of its ruins, visible and invisible. His head was fi lled with a sense of the too successful encroachment of the dead upon the living city; there was a disrupting parallel in the way that Dublin, buried behind him, was haunting his thoughts. (JJII 244) While Joyce’s distaste for Rome frequently found expression in a dismissal of its past, he writes in his letters—to an extent far out of proportion to the amount of time he spent there—about the city’s physical effect on him. Indeed, over no other city’s architecture, with the obvious exception of Dublin, does he spill so much ink. Ellmann uses his insight into the effect of the city’s ghosts on Joyce’s writing to explore the personal associations the author brought to bear on the setting of “The Dead.” His preoccupation with burial, with history, and with the persistence of both in the city’s present, however, points tantalizingly toward the possibility that Joyce engaged in a profound reappraisal of the relationship between a city and its own buried (or unburied) histories. 26 According to Jackson Cope, for whom the story is part of “a vision of a dead ‘city,’” historical memory is a suffocating force, its ghosts constricting the freedom of its living characters. 27 Cope

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 99 does not deal with the specific historicity of the dead to whom he refers, however, nor with the relationship between those histories and the contemporary city in which the characters move. Anthony Vidler argues that the erasure of spaces incommensurate with the version of modernity the cityscape embodies is bound up with the Enlightenment’s belief that transparency and rationality would dispel the forces of unreason (the premodern).28 Foucault, Vidler points out, says that this fascination with transparency was “constructed out of an initial fear, the fear of Enlightenment in the face of ‘darkened spaces,’” beyond the reach of rational inquiry and understanding. Vidler critiques Foucault’s emphasis on the relationship between power and transparency because it reproduces the Enlightenment’s contrast of light and dark, ignoring the extent to which power requires those spaces it renders invisible in order to operate: [A]ll the radiant spaces of modernism, from the fi rst Panopticon to the Ville Radieuse, should be seen as calculated not on the fi nal triumph of light over dark but precisely on the insistent presence of the one in the other. (172) Thus it is important to recognize that the spaces that technology and urban design erase are, as dark, dangerous or undesirable places, also created by the rationale of power. What is more, those irrational or unintegrated spaces remain a fundamental part of the urban fabric, whether the urban dweller can recognize this fact or not.29 The same can be said of the historical forces at work within the city. For Vidler, “urbanism,” the designed city, is heavily preoccupied with the question of historical memory. Historical monuments, for example, ask us to remember events, or particular historical figures. And in doing so, the monuments privilege those events or figures over others, who are consequently erased from historical memory. For Le Corbusier, indeed, the old city itself must be destroyed because its very topography is a reminder of and testament to a cancerous social order which his own designs seek to eliminate. The city becomes a narrative that we reproduce by walking it, but a narrative that is both historically and socially fabricated. Vidler notes, however, that plans such as Le Corbusier’s for the erasure of old Paris and its associations are frequently resisted by the established cityscape (199). Projects of architectonic control frequently fail to recognize that the interaction between the streetscape and its inhabitants is two-way, and that the imposed plan is inevitably in a dynamic relationship with the place upon which it is imposed. The act of erasure is therefore never complete.30 The ghosts of Gabriel Conroy’s Dublin insist on their own presence despite the encroachment of a rationalistic power apparatus, and so provide the possibility for a multiplicity of readings of the city unavailable to the Dubliners of the other stories. Joyce’s experience of Rome changed the way in which he chose to depict Dublin in “The Dead,” and understanding

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that depiction requires us to recognize the complexity of the relationship between cityscape and city-dweller.

ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF THE CITY While the conception of the cityscape as an integrative system has held sway over most theories of urban planning, Roland Barthes’s short essay “Semiology and Urbanism” has posited a vital alternative conception of the city, based on the notion that the streetscape is a discourse with which the city dweller engages.31 His conception of the city as “a discourse” spoken by traversing and inhabiting it reorients our understanding of the city through the perceiving consciousness. Barthes thus defi nes the city in terms of the impressions of its inhabitants. In this conception, the city has a “signifying” role as a “centre” around which the citizen’s shifting orientation in relation to his or her social world revolves. This signifying role exists alongside the city’s utilitarian functions, with which it conflicts. He elaborates, “There . . . exists a confl ict between signification and reason, or at least between signification and that calculating reason which wants all the elements of a city to be uniformly recuperated by planning” (194). In other words, the signifying role of the city, conditioned as it is by the perceiving consciousness, makes impossible the rational integration of the entire city as a spatial unit or, consequently, as a group of people. Of course, this is precisely the anxiety over urban life which led Le Corbusier to demand that man’s actions and thoughts be “dictated” to him. For Barthes this anxiety is, in effect, insurmountable, since for him the city is defi ned by “that basic rhythm of signification which is opposition, alternation and juxtaposition” (195). In other words, the process of signification in which the urban dweller engages each day necessarily creates confl icting and constantly shifting understandings of the city. The process of rationalization, the affi liative incorporation of the population into a coherent modern urban system, is continuously frustrated by the variegated responses available to each urban dweller in their engagement with the city on a daily basis. Of course, in most cities there are relatively well-defined functional areas, streets with mostly bars, for example, or mostly clothes shops. Regarding the city as a language system, however, Barthes argues that the person who “uses” the city reconstructs it only through his or her subjective and fragmentary experience. The significance of the streetscape is defined by that experience as opposed to its functionalist purpose. In Barthes’s interpretation, therefore, one’s experience and understanding of the city emerges not just from the functional designation of its spaces according to an abstract logic, but through the interaction of the perceiving consciousness with that logic. The attempt to uniformly consolidate all the elements of a city is even further undermined by the logic of that consolidation itself. In Barthes’s terms, this process can be regarded as an

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 101 attempt to stabilize the relationship between the signifier (where the signifier is a neighborhood or street) and signified (the function allocated to that space). The problem that arises is that the signifieds are very imprecise and shifting, so that the signifier is always becoming the signifier of “something else” (197, his italics). Because of this imprecision the city is always the site of our encounter with difference, alternate subjectivities, what Barthes calls “forces of rupture, ludic forces” (199–200). This tension between the totalistic and the subjective, between the general and the particular, between the panoramic and the semiotic, needs to be at the heart of any discussion of the relationship between literature and the city, especially one which concerns the ways in which people engage with the cityscape in everyday life. Michel de Certeau draws a distinction between the “intentions” of social products such as TV images and advertising, and the “use” to which those products are put by the people they are imposed upon.32 Foucault, he says, emphasizes the role of technological and social structures in the maintenance of discipline. He argues, however, that this is less important than the ways in which people resist that discipline in their use of and interaction with those structures on a daily basis: The goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline.” (xiv–xv) Since “the non-producers of culture” are at a remove from the structures of power, there is “a political dimension to everyday practices” insofar as they constitute a mode of personal expression through the very disciplinarian structures that subdue them. The utopian city represses dissonance and marginality, causing “the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the . . . stubborn resistances offered by traditions” (94). The city thus becomes meaningless for its inhabitants, essentially a technocratic and controlled space. De Certeau, however, emphasizes the possibility, and even the inevitability, of the limits of that control, beyond which subjective and subversive meanings can proliferate (95). Emphasizing the sense in which the city-dweller perceives the city as an abstract mechanism for the exertion of power, de Certeau also notes how the ever-changing and adaptive perspective of the person in the street enables him or her to interpret and reinterpret the cityscape in ways that undermine the systemic notion of it as an ahistorical, synchronic, socially and topographically integrated space, and make subjective use of the spaces beyond their functionalistic meaning. It is through this tension within the city, which is simultaneously an architectonic space and a dynamic, lived space, that we can begin to analyze the very specific challenges posed by “The Dead” to the conceptualization of the city operating in the rest of Dubliners.

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GABRIEL’S FABRICATED CITYSCAPE Gabriel is markedly more comfortable with the cityscape than other characters. Whereas Chandler projected his desires onto London or Eveline hers onto Buenos Aires, Gabriel repeatedly imagines himself on the streets of Dublin and associates his desires with highly specific topographical recollections. Accused of being a “West Briton” he recalls that “he used to wander down the quays to the second-hand booksellers, to Hickey’s on Bachelor’s Walk, to Webb’s or Massey’s on Aston’s Quay, or to O’Clohissey’s in the by-street” (D 188). On two occasions, unnerved by the thought of giving the after-dinner speech, he imagines himself walking in the Phoenix Park or outside on the quays (D 192, 202). Gabriel also frames his relationship with his wife Gretta in terms of the city itself. His recollections of “their secret life together” are urban images: “They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of her glove. He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace” (D 213). This ease with the cityscape is reflected in Gabriel’s ability to read and interpret its monumental landmarks selectively. Consider the following passage: As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said: —They say you never cross O’Connell Bridge without seeing a white horse. —I see a white man this time, said Gabriel. —Where? asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy. Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand. —Good night, Dan, he said gaily. (D 214)

Gabriel points out the statue, an act more commensurate with Roland Barthes’s conception of the city as “a discourse” spoken by traversing and inhabiting it, than with Le Corbusier’s vision of it as a mechanism for exerting an “immediate grasp” on its citizens and their behavior. Gabriel asserts his own ability to read the city. He salutes O’Connell’s statue “gaily,” a voluntary engagement with the monument at odds with other encounters with the streetscape throughout the collection. Conversely, Nelson’s Pillar does not seem to impose itself upon Gabriel’s consciousness; its total absence from the scene is conspicuous in light of Gabriel’s recognition of the other monument. Gabriel appears to be freed from the logic of the city as an ordering system, re-appropriating his agency over the relationship between himself and his environment in ways which the city denudes elsewhere in the collection. Why is Gabriel’s experience of the city so unusual? Gabriel’s identity is replete with political and sociocultural ambiguity and indeterminacy. This is reflected in his awkward disassociation of the spheres of literature and

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 103 politics when he is branded a West Briton by Miss Ivors for writing book reviews for a Unionist newspaper. The Conroy family live in the wealthy suburb of Monkstown, far to the south and east of the old center of the city. After the Act of Union in 1801 this was one of the places to which the Protestant Ascendancy fled to avoid paying Corporation taxes, thus contributing heavily to the decline and tenementization of the older city. This sense of social decline is encapsulated by the situation of the Morkan sisters who, we are told, “had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane . . . to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island” (D 138). The word “gaunt” here echoes its earlier use in “A Little Cloud.” Usher’s Island is at the heart of the old center of the city, an area that declined as the city developed eastward and fell increasingly out of the hands of Dublin’s Catholic mercantile class during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Kevin Whelan puts it, “Usher’s Island is a setting which reinforces the social liminality of the Morkan sisters, the sense of a cultural world which is out-of-kilter with the present, and which is close to termination.”33 Gabriel’s impression that “their grade of culture differed from his” emerges from his identification with that “present” to which his aunts have only partial access (D 179). His declaration that “Irish is not my language” (D 189), and that he is sick of his own country, corroborates Gabriel’s failure to identify with the culture of those around him. However, it is not at all clear with what culture he does identify. He coldly shrugs off the idea of visiting rural Connacht, the western province of Ireland that was, for the language movement of which Miss Ivors is a member, the repository of the nation’s cultural heritage. When asked whether his wife is from the west, he appears to fence off her identity from that of her ancestry: “Her people are” (D 189). Indeed, much of Gabriel’s discomfort with Catholic nationalist culture is expressed in his troubled re-creation of his wife’s identity. His mother’s dismissal of Gretta as “country cute” (D 187) he regards as untrue. The assumption implicit in his denial is that a country girl is, on face, untrustworthy and unsophisticated, and so his fantasies of Gretta instead revolve around the urban settings of the train platform and the bottling furnace. But Gabriel is unable to articulate coherently his discomfort with the political and cultural nationalism of Miss Ivors. He looks east throughout the story, to Belgium, France, Germany, Monkstown, the Gresham Hotel. When Gabriel is unable to meet Miss Ivors’s charge that he is ignorant of his “own” language, she says, “Of course, you’ve no answer” (D 190). Gabriel’s silence marks the absence of a stable set of cultural coordinates to adequately encapsulate his ambivalent political and cultural identity. As a wealthy Catholic, wealthy enough that fifteen shillings for a review appears to him a “paltry cheque” (D 188), he is faced with an ideological dilemma that he negotiates in his reading of the cityscape. As well as his salute to the statue of O’Connell, on two occasions Gabriel thinks about the Wellington monument in Phoenix Park (D 192,

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202). A large obelisk originally built as a testimonial to Arthur Wellesley, the fi rst Duke of Wellington, the monument commemorated the Dublinborn nobleman’s victory over France at the Battle of Waterloo. Gabriel’s repeated contemplation of the obelisk, a phallic symbol of British military strength, might be read as a corroboration of Miss Ivors’s labeling him a West Briton.34 Gabriel’s later nod to Daniel O’Connell, however, would appear to call this reading into question. Alternatively, we might remember that Wellington, famously sensitive about his Irish origins, once apparently commented that “being born in a stable does not make one a horse.”35 Certainly, Gabriel’s sense of his own superiority to the declining social world of his aunts fi nds a sympathetic mirror here. Wellington, as well as being an army general, was also twice Prime Minister of Great Britain. During his fi rst term, he was responsible for pushing the Catholic Relief Act 1829 through Parliament. This act sought to address Daniel O’Connell’s demands for Catholic Emancipation, that is to say, the removal of punitive laws designed to prevent Catholic participation in the running of the state. While it allowed Catholics to take seats in Parliament, however, and thus to have an investment in the state apparatus, it also disenfranchised poorer Catholics by raising the economic qualifications for voting fivefold. O’Connell, himself a native speaker of Irish, also famously advocated the adoption of the English language by Irish Catholics as a pragmatic measure, to improve their economic opportunities. In his meditations on the memorials to Wellington and O’Connell, Gabriel is reading the cityscape as reflective of his own sociopolitical situation, adapting its contesting ideological signifiers into a singular narrative that elides the complex social, cultural, and political identifications with which he is faced during the dinner-party.36 Gabriel’s reading of the cityscape is primarily an evacuation of the historical complexity that it embodies, smoothing into coherence the contradictory historical narratives that it represents. The very architecture of Dublin, however, is itself imbued with a host of uncomfortable historical resonances for Gabriel. We have already seen how the “gaunt” Morkan house carries with it intimations of the flight of Dublin’s nobility from the city center and the social decline that ensued. What is more, as Kevin Whelan has demonstrated, not only does the story take place largely in areas with strong links to the 1798 rebellion, but Joyce was also very aware of these links. 37 One of the unacknowledged sources for Gabriel’s after-dinner speech is John Kells Ingram’s poem about 1798, “The Memory of the Dead” (D 202).38 Such resonances remain submerged, however. The subject of the monks at Mount Mellaray is “buried in a silence of the table” when it begins to bring to light the tensions between the Protestant Mr. Browne and the other Catholic guests (D 201). Although during his speech Gabriel does acknowledge the importance of “the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die,” he ultimately advises that the living should not dwell on the dead generations “beyond recall.” His assertion that “we have all of us living

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 105 duties and living affections” is part of a concerted effort to bury history, to consign dissonance to silence (D 204). Vidler argues that there is no uncanny architecture, but rather that architecture can, from time to time, be invested with uncanny qualities (12). Gabriel possesses the ability to fabricate a history from the cityscape, in his reading of the O’Connell statue, his thoughts on the Wellington monument, and his deployment of the statue of King William III in his parable of Irish social paralysis. However the investment of meaning in these monuments is always at the expense of other historical possibilities. Indeed his relationship with his wife, or rather the understanding of it that he possesses, is intimately bound up with precisely this type of historical erasure. When Gabriel sees Gretta listening to “The Lass of Aughrim,” the narrative of colonial misrule that the song tells irrupts again into the story. But with it comes also the story of Michael Furey, the vague details of whose death (“He was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly” [D 220]) intimate the suffering of a population from whom Gabriel has attempted to distance himself, while simultaneously bringing to consciousness the reality that the most passionate love of Gretta’s life has not been himself. When Gretta says, “I think he died for me” (D 220), she becomes both Gabriel’s wife and Cathleen ni Houlihan, both reality and metaphor. Gabriel’s personal and historical narratives, built on a series of erasures and denials, are intimately bound up and revealed to him at the story’s end. When the last of the guests are about to get a cab, we are told that “the cabman was directed differently” by Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne, and that the sisters give him “cross-directions” (D 209). Oddly also, for a group of residents of the city, the characters in the cab spend part of their trip home “pointing out some building or street” (D 214). The story intimates the possibility, and even the inevitability, of everyone fabricating their own city, and thus of the city being multiple, dissonant and contradictory. Gabriel’s “journey westward” at the end of the story is the culmination of a traumatic coming to terms with the multiplicity of history, and with the challenges it creates for his understanding of himself and the world that he has created and lives in. But his mental journey to the site of personal and historical burial frees Gabriel from the constrictions of the monolithic and exclusionary cityscape he has fabricated for himself. Gabriel’s ability to read the city appears to problematize the architectonic relationship between cityscape and character that is established in the previous stories in the collection. Ultimately this ability appears to be bound up with Gabriel’s own social status and identification with the historical narrative represented by the city’s topography. Nonetheless his negotiation of that narrative’s contesting and contradictory voices signals a movement toward a more complex relationship between space and character than in the other stories. “The Dead” therefore anticipates the richly layered narrative strategies of Ulysses, where the language representing the city reflects

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the often incongruous ideological significations that continuously redefi ne both its topography and the lives of those who call it home. NOTES 1. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: Architectural Press, 1947), 164–165. Further references to this work will be cited in parentheses. 2. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: Architectural Press, 1946), 7. 3. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York & London: Norton, 1994), 24. 4. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 18. 5. David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1999), 2. 6. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002). 7. See Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938), 3: “The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship . . .” 8. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 5. 9. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 6. 10. Minutes of the Wide Streets Commission for Dublin, 1802, 16 [Held at Dublin City Archives, Pearse Street, Dublin]. 11. Edel Sheridan, “Living in the Capital City: Dublin in the Eighteenth Century” in Dublin Through Space and Time (c.900–1900), eds. Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), 136–158, 141. 12. For a comprehensive analysis of the work of the Wide Streets Commission, see Edel Sheridan, “Designing the Capital City: Dublin c.1660–1810,” in Dublin Through Space and Time (c.900–1900), ed. Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), 66–135. See especially 108–135. For an analysis of the ways in which local and national politics influenced the work of the Commission, see Edward McParland, “Strategy in the Planning of Dublin, 1750–1800” in Cities and Merchants: French and Irish Perspectives on Urban Development, 1500–1900, ed. P. Butel and L. M. Cullen (Dublin: Trinity College, 1986), 97–107. 13. Murray Fraser, “Public Building and Colonial Policy in Dublin, 1760–1800” in Architectural History 28 (1985), 102–123, 105. 14. William Chambers, Treatise on Civil Architecture (London: Printed for the author, by J. Haberkorn, 1759). 15. Joseph Valente, “Joyce’s Politics: Race, Nation and Transnationalism,” in Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 77. 16. For a study of the conditions and history of Dublin’s extensive slums during this period, see Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999). 17. Joseph Brady, “Dublin at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in A New and Complex Sensation: Essays on Joyce’s Dubliners, ed. Oona Frawley (Dublin: Lilliput, 2004), 10–32, 12. 18. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 13.

Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin 107 19. Jameson, Cultural Turn, 14. 20. Deirdre Flynn, “An Uncomfortable Fit: Joyce’s Women in Dublin and Trieste,” in Joyce and the City: The Signifi cance of Place, ed. Michael Begnal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 51–64, 53. 21. David Pierce, James Joyce’s Ireland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 88–89. 22. Ronald Bush argues that Joyce’s decision to turn away from the “trustworthy” omniscient narrator is influenced by Flaubert; see “Joyce’s Modernisms,” in Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 10–38. 23. Pierce, James Joyce’s Ireland, 98–99. 24. See, for example, Chester G. Anderson, James Joyce and His World (New York: Viking, 1967), 65. 25. See John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), 81. 26. See Letters II, 171. 27. Jackson I. Cope, Joyce’s Cities: Archaeologies of the Soul (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 8. 28. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). Further references to this work will be cited in parentheses. 29. A very good example of such an unintegrated space with which Joyce was clearly very familiar, was the Monto district in Dublin. Despite attempts by Lieutenant-Colonel John Ross of the Dublin Metropolitan Police to close down the area in 1901, the resultant spread of prostitution to more ‘respectable’ areas like Sackville Street persuaded authorities to roll back their offensive. Thus Monto became a marginal space, its activities sanctioned by official authority, and yet marked off from the rest of the city. As it served to contain and restrict the sexual proclivities of the citizenry, it was both a necessary part of the city’s spatial logic, while also excluded from the ideological conception of the city’s topography. See Terry Fagan, Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle, the Story of Dublin’s Notorious Red Light District as Told by the People Who Lived There (North Inner City Folklore Group [n.d.]). 30. See Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 44. Duffy discusses the work of the anthropologist Marc Augé, who argued that the exercise of power involved the aggressive rationalization of “places” with all their historical associations and particularities, into “non-places,” spaces without cultural specificity or identity. In this process “placedness” is “relegated to the status of vestige.” 31. Roland Barthes, “Semiology and Urbanism,” in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1988), 191–201. Further references to this work will be cited in parentheses. 32. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California, 1984), xii–xiii. Further references to this work will be cited in parentheses. 33. Kevin Whelan, “The Memories of the Dead,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism 15.1 (2002): 59–97, 78. 34. See Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 139. 35. Robin Neillands, Wellington and Napoleon: Clash of Arms (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2002), 32. 36. During the course of the nineteenth century, in fact, the Corporation became a more nationalist-orientated body, so much so that it took great pains to

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place new monuments to nationalist figures such as Daniel O’Connell in highly visible situations, as a deliberate attempt to counteract the prevailing ideological tenor of the city. See Joseph Brady, “Dublin at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in A New and Complex Sensation: Essays on Joyce’s Dubliners, ed. Oona Frawley (Dublin: Lilliput, 2004), 10–32, 14–15. 37. Kevin Whelan, “The Memories of the Dead,” 80–82. 38. Jeri Johnson notes that this poem is a source for Gabriel’s speech. See James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 160n27, 275.

6

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner Plumbing Consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin Michael Rubenstein

. . . for the time being we have to settle for knowing less about consciousness than novelists pretend to know. (David Lodge1) The sewer is the conscience of the city. (Victor Hugo2)

This chapter argues that Joyce accorded special status to public works in his fictions. By public works I mean a restricted set of technologies—water, gas, and electricity services—that were rapidly transforming modern urban life in Joyce’s time. The “special status” of public works in Joyce’s fictions resides in his revaluation of the technological networks of power that structure, connect, and defi ne the urban space of Dublin—and the national space of Ireland. I give evidence from two of Joyce’s texts: Ulysses and “The Dead.” I approach these texts in reverse chronological order because I see Joyce’s thinking about public works taking on a kind of maturity in Ulysses, and the emergent role of public works in ”The Dead” is best explicated by looking back from that vantage point. Many critics have pointed to Joyce’s fascination with modern technology. My aim is to bring together criticism concerned with issues of technology in Joyce and criticism concerned to excavate a “postcolonial Joyce,” in order to show that Joyce’s interest in technology was ultimately in the service of, in the well-known fi nal lines of A Portrait, “forg[ing] in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (P 253). The Joyce who wrote Ulysses fi nally discarded the metaphor of the smithy— and thus the implicit metaphor of the sword—in favor of public works. “Forging” national consciousness gives way after A Portrait to “engineering” national consciousness. This metaphorical movement reveals Joyce as not only modernist but also modernizing, which distinguishes his work from that of many of his modernist peers, as well as his peers within the context of Irish national literature. As an Irish writer, however, Joyce was keenly aware of the complicity between colonialism and modernization.

110 Michael Rubenstein His version of modernization, therefore, much like his version of modernism, is eccentric and strains to fi nd a way to reconcile the technological progress of modernity with a vision of the good society. Public works, I argue, are Joyce’s answer to the depredations of modernity, as well as his affi rmation of modernity’s utopian promise. I’ll begin with an oft-quoted and much discussed passage from the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses: What did Bloom do at the range? He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it flow. Did it flow? Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of £5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street . . . (U 17.160–182)

I have written elsewhere about this passage, as have many others to various and confl icting purposes.3 And I have argued, following Fredric Jameson, that it may represent an alternative to “the vitalist ideology of Molly’s better known fi nal affi rmation.”4 In other words, this “yes” is a more utopian “yes” than Molly’s final “yes” because it affi rms “the transformation of Nature by human and collective praxis.”5 It affi rms, in other words, urban engineering instead of Molly’s romantic affi rmation of love and life. In what follows the “yes,” “Ithaca” elegizes—though not without irony— the labor of planning, constructing, maintaining, and governing the city’s water supply. Whether we agree with Jameson or not, we can at least agree that the passage spatializes the moment Bloom turns the tap in an entirely unexpected way, tracing the Dublin waterworks at a moment when their relevance to the narrative action is not at all clear. We might call it a spatial digression, as our attention is taken out of Bloom’s house, to the Wicklow reservoir and, though a series of pipes and waterways, back fi nally to 7 Eccles Street. We might fi nd precedent for this digression through the waterworks in “Ithaca” in an obvious if unlikely place: in Homer’s Odyssey, and particularly in Eric Auerbach’s explication of Homeric digression as he outlines it in the opening chapter of Mimesis. There Auerbach describes an episode in The Odyssey in which Odysseus’s nurse Euryclea recognizes him, though he has not yet revealed his identity, from a scar on

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his thigh as she is washing his feet. At the moment of her recognition, seventy verses interrupt the present action to describe the origin of the scar, an interruption of the narrative that resembles the wildly digressive rhythm of Joyce’s “Ithaca.” Homer’s “basic impulse” according to Auerbach’s analysis of the scene is “to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fi xed in their spatial and temporal relations.”6 And a little further, “the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.” There is no “subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure.”7 The story of the scar remains syntactically unsubordinated to the main storyline, in effect independent of it and without any linguistic indication that it is less important than the main storyline of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. This kind of insubordination, as it were, is evident in Joyce’s passage about the Dublin waterworks. The travels of the water take up more textual space than the narrative of Bloom’s actions. “Did it flow?” is a yes-or-no question. What follows after the answer “yes” defies the discipline of the structure: the question wants results while the answer gives, instead, explanation and description, creating an effect something like a child asking “why?” after every adult answer. There is no indication that the path of the water is anywhere in Bloom’s conscious thought, just as, as Auerbach points out about the story of the scar, Odysseus himself never remembers it; it is not a subjective digression but a literally objective one in which “a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin.”8 We might call this the insubordination of things in texts, things that take up textual space, that have their own stories to tell, and that (or who) won’t shut up and let us get on with the story. Of course, Bloom is not in “the thick of battle” but rather is busying himself making cocoa for his guest; but he is, like Odysseus, lately returned home, so that the slaughter of the suitors that marks the homecoming of Odysseus to Ithaca is precisely the parallel structure. To whatever extent Joyce modeled “Ithaca” on the catechism in form, in content it is—or at least, the waterworks passage is—modeled on Homeric digression (we will be in a position to see why this Homeric relation is so important—in the sense of predating a Socratic theory of technology—in the discussion of “Wandering Rocks” that follows). The digression of the scar in Homer is a digression concerned with the lineage of the mark or proof of identity (the scar proves it is Odysseus), of individuality (there can only be one with such a scar), and of sovereignty (the mark of the king). Joyce’s digression on water could be considered similar in almost every respect, except that one of its effects is to remind us that many people may have the same experience at the tap throughout the course of a day and even simultaneously. It reminds us of the authority of the state, of the institutions that guarantee such a reliable water supply to 7 Eccles Street that under normal narrative circumstances no one would bother to ask, “Did it flow?” Under such normal narrative circumstances

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we might never be treated to the explanation of how, from where, by whose authority, with what fi nancial resources, and to what satisfactions and dissatisfactions it flowed. The waterworks are the consequence of a corporate authority, a collective one, which is to say, paradoxically, an incorporeal one, one that cannot by defi nition have a speaking voice as a character in a novel, at least, again, under normal narrative circumstances. The body of the king or sovereign dissolved into the broad division of labor of modern authority; the individual turned into many; sovereignty divided into multiples and placed, fi nally, nowhere in particular but everywhere, in every home: all this sounds very much like what Auerbach is saying at the end of the last chapter of Mimesis, “The Brown Stocking,” in reference to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light. The more numerous, varied, and simple the people are who appear as subjects of such random moments, the more effectively must what they have in common shine forth. In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent—below the surface confl icts—the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples . . . It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people. So the complicated process of dissolution which led to fragmentation of the exterior action, to reflection of consciousness, and to stratification of time seems to be tending toward a very simple solution.9 Joyce’s waterworks put forward the public utility as a crucial social fact for modernist literature, as an often overlooked “elementary thing . . . which our lives have in common,” one of the modalities through which “the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened.” If Auerbach is, rather surprisingly, seemingly positive about “a common life of mankind on earth,” surely his optimism cannot be about the process of commodification; surely not about standardization under the Fordist mode of production; surely not about the extensions and retreats of various despotisms across the globe. But perhaps it could be about the public utilities that bind us together into groups that rely on the same networks of water pipes, gas lines, power grids, and—though this is beyond the scope of the present work—communication networks.

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PLUMBING CONSCIOUSNESS Such are Ulysses’s hopes for the utopian promise of technology. If the waterworks can hijack the narrative flow of Joyce’s fiction with its own, then we might say with some conviction that the waterworks “speak” on their own behalf in “Ithaca.” To put it another way: Joyce gives epistemological teeth to the critical commonplace that the city is also a character in the novel. Ulysses literalizes that cliché, makes it mean something by concretizing it in public works. I am merely suggesting, here, that the waterworks might be considered—figuratively speaking—as a kind of narrating consciousness in “Ithaca.”10 The suggestion will bear itself out in “Wandering Rocks” with even more force. “Wandering Rocks” stages simultaneity; the chapter’s nineteen sections narrate and renarrate the same temporal sequences from different locations around Dublin. Its perspective is presumably that of an omniscient narrator, though this narrator has a sense of irony in tone and style that defies traditional omniscient narration. The narrating voice of “Wandering Rocks” might have a distinctive personality, but it doesn’t have a character, which is only to say that the character of the narrating voice here is not in the roster of characters in Ulysses: literally a no-body without even a fictional name. In “Wandering Rocks,” as Clive Hart puts it, “the mind of this city is both mechanical and maliciously ironic.”11 As characters intersect each other, many of their movements are repeated, interrupted, and re-presented without any of the syntactic cues that would normally allow the reader to switch from one perspective to another. The viceregal cavalcade that gets full treatment in the fi nal episode begins its procession at Phoenix Park and, in its path through the city, greets and is greeted by the characters treated earlier in the chapter: “Mr Thomas Kernan . . . greet[s] [the viceroy] vainly from afar” (U 10.1183–1184); the cavalcade goes “unsaluted by Mr Dudley White, B. L., M. A.” (U 10.1185– 1186); “Mr Simon Dedalus . . . st[ands] still in midstreet and br[ings] his hat low” (U 10.1199–1201). Amid this list of characters, the Poddle river appears where it merges with the Liffey and offers its salute as well. “From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage” (U 10.1196–1197). That “tongue,” I want to suggest, is—barring the improbability of talking sewage—a plausible figure for the narrating voice of “Wandering Rocks” as a whole. The ironic tone of the chapter might easily be summed up in the description of the Poddle’s tongue of liquid sewage: the river gives a raspberry to the cavalcade, announcing its subversive “fealty” and, not content to stop at mocking authority, mocks throughout nearly every character it encounters. As Hart again points out, the Poddle empties into the Liffey at Wellington Quay, not Wood Quay as this line from “Wandering Rocks” would have it (Wellington Quay is about a half-kilometer downriver of Wood Quay; both run along the south bank of the Liffey, with Essex Quay separating them). Hart interprets the geographical imprecision of the line as

114 Michael Rubenstein one of Joyce’s few factual feints in Ulysses. The viceregal cavalcade around which “Wandering Rocks” is organized, for example, actually took place on May 31, 1904, not June 16. While this is easily explicable as the author’s need to “change some of the facts in order to accommodate his fiction,” other factual changes, like moving the Poddle’s mouth from Wellington to Wood Quay, have less to do with plot and more to do with symbolism.12 Because the Dublin Corporation Cleansing Department Offices were located at 15–16 Wood Quay, Hart suggests, it makes sense to have the sewage emerge from just underneath the building; it produces “a more powerful image of unified sewage.”13 More than an image of “unified sewage,” however, the relocation of the Poddle’s sluice gate to Wood Quay is one more way of rendering Dublin, in Michael Seidel’s words, “as a city of traps, a city of irresolution, culs de sac, accidents, missed connections and missed streetcars, misread signs, wrong turns, indignities, and sheer labyrinthine terror, a Minoan as much as a Greek adventure.”14 And it is true that the characters in “Wandering Rocks” seem as confused by Dublin’s geography as the reader may be, as if Dublin suffered in both fiction and fact from a certain unreality. But under the sign of unified sewage emerges also a powerful image of the urban totality. Wood Quay was the site of the very fi rst Viking settlement in Dublin in AD 841, just east of the point where the Poddle met the Liffey. Those early Norse settlers docked their ships in a body of stagnant water at the rivers’ intersection which they called “Black Pool,” a phrase taken from the Irish “Dubh Linn,” which was appropriated from the Irish Christian monastery they conquered when they settled there. For Joyce to relocate the “tongue of liquid sewage” to this historical site of nomos is to give that tongue something rather specific, if maybe a little disappointing, to say: “Dubh Linn,” or “Dublin.”15 Joyce is just as interested in relocating the rivers’ confluence in time as he is in relocating it in space, marking the beginning of the history of a place called Dublin in a real but long gone “black pool” that has since metempsychosed into a black pool of liquid sewage.16 The tongue speaks the etymology of the Hiberno-English word “Dublin”; it speaks the ontology of the vital entity known as “Dublin”; likewise, it speaks a whole history of conquest (from the Celts to the Vikings to the Normans) and relativizes what appears, in such a long historical perspective, as the pompousness, the ignorance, and above all the fleetingness of the authority represented in the viceregal cavalcade. The narrating voice of “Wandering Rocks” is the sewer. Dublin speaks its name from the river’s mouth. Liquid sewage grants being to the city of Dublin, naming an organism but also giving it a voice.17 Dublin speaks itself, and it mocks the cavalcade with sly civility.18 The Poddle was and is a small river, so small that it was bricked over in 1800, so small that it could almost be called a stream. The Poddle’s tongue asks us to make a big conceptual-metaphorical leap by way of simple word association from river to tongue to stream to “stream of consciousness” to “sewer of consciousness.”

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This is the leap that “Wandering Rocks” makes. If the stream of consciousness was overburdened by an almost involuntary association with a kind of natural idyll—a stream in some pristine Alpine setting surrounded by fi rs, or some such—then Joyce in a fashion typical of his scatological thinking replaces that association with a stream of liquefied human excrement, which is really only to say that he literally humanizes it.19 The networks of rivers, sewers, and canals that make up Dublin’s circulatory system, when taken as a whole, present a plausible “point of view” from which the narrating voice of the chapter gains its multiple and simultaneous perspectives, and they explain why “Wandering Rocks” can jump from one section to another without syntactic connection. The infrastructure of the city “lives” each geographical point simultaneously, it is everywhere at once; it doesn’t need syntactic connection because it has infrastructural connection. The stream of consciousness is wedded here to omniscient narration; or rather, the narrating voice of “Wandering Rocks” is not omniscient at all—it simply remains within the limited geographical scope of the networks of rivers and sewers that defi ne the municipal limits of Dublin. The impression of omniscience is not superhuman but rather nonhuman; it is, moreover, not even omniscience so much as the “stream of consciousness” of the sewer, its “thought,” so to speak. “The sewer,” wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables in 1862, “is the conscience of the city.”20 The line comes from a chapter in the novel called “The Intestine of Leviathan” which momentarily suspends the plot structure of the novel, pausing instead to make a lengthy digression into the history of the Parisian sewer system. Digressions like these were a feature of the nineteenth-century epic novel—one thinks, for example, of certain sections of Melville’s Moby Dick as well. But here, in Ulysses, the sewer as conscience of the city is not merely asserted, but performed through narrative technique. It is one of the signal differences between the nineteenthcentury realist novel and Joyce’s twentieth-century avant-garde modernism that one should declare the sewer the conscience of the city—in French conscience serves ambiguously for both the English words “conscience” and “consciousness”—while the other should show us the sewer as the consciousness of the city, by ventriloquizing it, personifying it, and endowing it with fictional being. That represented thought is the product of a tekhne that is both an engineering marvel and a literary innovation: tekhne, that is to say, as inseparable from episteme. “At the beginning of its history,” argues Bernard Stiegler, “philosophy separates tekhne from episteme, a distinction that had not yet been made in Homeric times.” From Plato onward a confl ict arose in Greek philosophical discourse: “[T]he philosophical episteme is pitched against the sophistic tekhne, whereby all technical knowledge is devalued.” As a result “the analysis of technics is made in terms of ends and means, which implies necessarily that no dynamic proper belongs to technical beings.”21 In Stiegler’s account of the classical split between tekhne and episteme we

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fi nd another way in which Ulysses can be considered deeply Homeric, in the sense of being pre-Socratic, because the technical objects that appear in Ulysses are not at all represented “in terms of ends and means.” In the case of the Poddle’s tongue, in fact, technical objects are granted being, if not human being, and even the potential for speech. Ulysses thus “locates” narrative omniscience in the tekhne of public works in “Wandering Rocks” just as in “Ithaca.”22 This narrative omniscience is also a mechanical form of stream of consciousness because it is a representation of how a machine— the public works—endowed with being might think. The novel locates the imagined urban community of Dublin in the simultaneous connection of the city’s inhabitants through infrastructure, and it threads that connection through the deep temporality of the city’s nomos, Dubh Linn. In doing so, Ulysses forges “another relationship to technics,” to borrow again from Stiegler, “one that rethinks the bond originarily formed by, and between, humanity, technics, and language.”23 The thorny question of being for technological objects is taken up directly in the thirteenth episode of “Wandering Rocks,” close to the center of the chapter, when Stephen improbably addresses his thoughts to an electrical power station in Fleet Street. The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can. Bawd and butcher were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A look around. (U 10.821–827)24 Stephen’s trepidation around the throb and hum of the powerhouse bears a striking resemblance to Joyce’s famous fear of thunder and thunderstorms. “The thunderstorm as a vehicle of divine power and wrath,” Richard Ellmann writes, “moved Joyce’s imagination so profoundly that to the end of his life he trembled at the sound” (JJI 25).“Beingless beings” may be a reference to divine creative power, and since Stephen places himself “between two roaring worlds,” we might imagine that he is thinking about his identity as an artist, as someone trying to access the divine in order to create something transcendent in the human world. Stephen conceives of himself, that is to say, as a mediator between the human and the divine, or the profane and the sacred. 25 The problem with this is that the power station is a thunderstorm created by humans, god’s power usurped by the Dublin Corporation Electric Light Station. 26 In other words, the power station is, in some sense, the artist’s competition. This, perhaps more than anything else, is the source of Stephen’s ambivalence, characterized by an urge to “be on,” on the one hand, and a vocation to sing the machine’s “heart,” on the other. That the power station could be the throbbing heart of “Wandering

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Rocks” and the sewer its municipal circulatory system bears witness to the way that Joyce used the basic technologies of the urban polis as epistemic engines of his fiction.

IN THE WORKS: “THE DEAD” . . . [E]ven the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate lives is ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the public realm. (Hannah Arendt 27)

“The Dead,” Joyce confided to his brother, is “a ghost story.”28 The statement is false to the extent that the story remains within the boundaries of the expectations for realist fiction: no ghosts appear, though characters often feel haunted. The statement is true to the extent that Joyce modeled the story on gothic fiction and ghost stories and emulated the mood that those stories evoked. He accomplishes this through a trick of the light; reading the role of gaslight in “The Dead” is the key to understanding how. It is public works that haunt “The Dead,” in the form of the gasworks. Michael Furey is described as “a boy in the gasworks” (D 219). If Furey is the obvious “ghost” in the story, it is his medium and not his spirit that is the message. And by medium here, we should hear a reference both to an Aristotelian sense of “medium” as a philosophical concept, and a Yeatsian (or perhaps a Madame Blavatskian) sense of medium as a mystical concept. As Luke Gibbons has argued, [[D]espite all Joyce’s skepticism towards the occult and spiritualism, he retained an interest in key theosophical concerns such as cyclical history and the pursuit of arcane, hermetic knowledge. One particular aspect that held an enduring fascination was the possibility of world memory, an “akasic” medium, as described in Ulysses, that records “all that ever anywhere wherever was” (U 7.882–83) . . . [F]or while the “shade” of Michael Furey is clearly lodged, at one level, in Gretta Conroy’s unconscious, it also has a “trans-subjective” element, impinging on Gabriel’s consciousness as if it had an (after)life of its own.]29 Furey is indeed “impinging on Gabriel’s consciousness” and in a “trans-subjective” way, but the “akasic medium” is hardly mysterious here: it is gaslight, in particular the gas-fuelled streetlight outside the window of Gabriel and Gretta’s room in the Gresham Hotel. This is to say that Joyce’s “skepticism towards the occult and spiritualism” plays out in the way he sets up Michael Furey’s haunting as rooted in a very material, even mundane, source, wholly explicable without any recourse to the supernatural. It is Joyce’s way of undermining the occultism of the Revival while at the same time writing

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a ghost story that participates in the Revival’s tradition. Remaining within the tradition while subtly undermining its mysticism, Joyce can thus offer an alternative model of national community via the medium of public works. Mysticism is no longer opposed to modernity, as it was for the revivalists; instead, Joyce suggests that modernity contains its own modes of mysticism and, along with them, its own modes of community. The moment “The Dead” shades into the genre of the gothic or the ghost story—the moment, that is, when the ghost of Michael Furey enters the scene—occurs as a hotel porter guides Gretta and Gabriel into their room at the Gresham Hotel. The porter pointed to the tap of the electric-light and began a muttered apology but Gabriel cut him short. –We don’t want any light. We have light enough from the street. And I say, he added, pointing to the candle, you might remove that handsome article, like a good man. The porter took up his candle again, but slowly for he was surprised by such a novel idea. Then he mumbled good-night and went out. Gabriel shot the lock to. A ghostly light from the street lamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door. (D 216)

Gabriel insists that the streetlamp light the scene because he thinks he is creating a romantic setting in which to seduce his wife. But the streetlamp, which in fact used gaslight, powerfully insinuates Michael Furey into their room, creating a morbid three-way intimacy instead. The passage, however, is meaningfully ambiguous about the kind of lamplight coming in from the street, characterizing it only as from a “street lamp,” failing twice to specify the source. This appears as a kind of sly refusal made up of two dissimulating answers. What kind of lamp lights the street? A “street lamp,” of course. Alright, but what kind of light comes out of the street lamp? “Ghostly light.” OK, but what kind of ghostly light? Would it have been too obvious to say “gaslight”? Is there a meaning to the text’s refusal to name the quality of the light by its material source, relying instead on ambient description? Luke Gibbons has shown that the streetlamp outside the hotel is indeed a gas lamp: in 1904, Dublin was making its fi rst transitions to electrical street lighting, but at that time it was mostly in commercial use and there was not a twenty-four-hour supply (thus the “failure” of the electric light in the Gresham, which might otherwise be explained as Michael’s ghostly insinuation of himself into the scene).30 Joyce surely knew this without saying so, because otherwise Michael Furey’s ghostly presence in the Conroys’ hotel room makes a lot less sense. The lamp, by the logic of the story, has to be gaslit in order to create, to borrow a phrase from Hart, “a unified vision of” the gasworks. Certainly we can hear “gas light” in the weak

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rhyme links Joyce evokes with “ghostly light” or even, in one of the more telling misprints in early versions of “The Dead,” “ghastly light.”31 The light’s ghostliness, however, may refer not only to the ghost of Michael Furey that inhabits it, but also to its own soon-to-be-realized obsolescence and replacement by electrical light whose qualities of harshness, brightness, and much-increased visibility would banish both the gasworks and the ghost in them to the dustbin of history. How would a story about a boy in the gasworks be told without gaslight? In what way would his story remain haunting at all? Within a few moments of entering the room, Gretta tells Gabriel about Michael Furey. She describes him as a boy who “was in the gasworks” (D 219). “He was in the gasworks” is an Irish colloquialism denoting the fact that Michael Furey worked in the Galway gasworks (no different from saying “he was in the civil service” to mean “he worked in the civil service”), but the phrase is doing more work here than just providing authentic vernacular dialogue. It does so fi rstly by abstracting us from the notion of an individual’s “work” to the notion of the gasworks, an institutional brand of work; secondly by abstracting us from the Galway gasworks in particular to gasworks in general, pointing to the way in which every city or town will have a gasworks, such that it is not necessary to signal in speech any more specificity than “the gasworks” once we know that she is talking about Galway; and thirdly by decorporealizing Furey, rendering him ambiently present in the gasworks rather than assigning him a place and defi nite set of activities or tasks. What is it to say that he is in the gasworks? That is not a very precise kind of localization, and should forcefully recall Aunt Julia’s earlier usage of another colloquialism, which she utters in reference to Mr. Browne: “Browne is everywhere . . . He has been laid on here like the gas” (D 206). Where does the gasworks end anyway? At the place where gas is produced, or much further on, at the ends of the gas mains through which gas is piped into streetlights, commercial buildings, government offices, and private homes—all the places, in other words, where the gas is “laid on”? The latter is, of course, the implication of the story: Furey is, it turns out, everywhere that gaslight is. This is to say that he is everywhere the story takes place, everywhere it is possible to see anything, every place about which a story of a dark night and human interaction and movement through space and time can be told. He is the entire visual field of the story from beginning to end, with the one exception of the hotel porter’s candle. The only real inaccuracy in Gretta’s description of what Furey “was” is in the verb tense. Furey is in the gasworks. Her choice of words is limited by Gabriel’s hostile question, “what was he?” which embodies not the reality of Furey’s pastness but Gabriel’s determined wish for it, as well as a dismissive objectifi cation— not “who was he,” but “what was he?” Gabriel attempts with the question both to dehumanize Furey and at the same time to initiate a social comparison by which he imagines he might appear more appealing. Was

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he a cosmopolitan bourgeois writer like myself? Do you not prefer me to a boy who, because he worked in the gasworks, had no real hope for the social mobility you have achieved through your marriage to me?32 In the larger context, however, of Stephen’s nervous—and even, I am arguing, jealous—response in Ulysses to the Fleet Street Electrical plant, can we not see in Gabriel’s reaction to Michael Furey more than the surface story of sexual jealousy? Gabriel seizes Furey as a sexual rival, but actually he feels his humiliation most keenly as infl icted not by Michael Furey in particular but by “a boy in the gasworks,” which may be to say the gasworks themselves. Again we see the anxious comparison and competition between the writer—this time Gabriel—and the public works, the same anxiety we saw in Stephen in “Wandering Rocks,” and for which Michael Furey is, in part at least, a screen. The gasworks, then, are the medium by which the ghost of Michael Furey haunts the characters in “The Dead” “trans-subjectively,” as Gibbons put it. It is remarkable how well such trans-subjectivity can stand as a version of the imagined community of the nation. And it is equally remarkable that, when critics take up the last paragraph of “The Dead” as an instantiation of the imagined national community, the snow—and not the gasworks— stands as the metaphor for that community. The snow, however, is really a trick of the light. Snow reflects light; it doesn’t produce it. And if it is snowing, there is cloud cover, which is to say that there is no natural light in “The Dead,” which begins around ten o’clock and ends before sunrise—no moon, no stars, and no sun. What does snow look like in pitch darkness? It doesn’t look like anything, because it, like everything else, is not visible in pitch darkness. The image, then, of the snow falling generally all over Ireland forces the reader to imagine snow visually, which is impossible unless we are to imagine a light source where, precisely, there is no natural light source. We are in a world lit only by gas, and Furey is thus “in” the works—the fictional works, so to speak—in ways so fundamental that we have to consider him, and gaslight too, as something more fundamental than a theme of the story, or the point of the story, or the subject of the story. Gaslight and Furey are even more embedded in the narrative apparatus than that: in fact, they might be said to be an indispensable part of the narrative apparatus. This is to see gaslight not as an akasic medium but rather as a medium in the classical Aristotelian sense of the word. For Aristotle, according to Kevis Goodman, a medium is “a necessary condition of sense perception, although not a sufficient one (for Aristotle, [media] are part of a complex relationship that includes the accessibility of the object and the development of the faculty of sense).” “[A]s in the example of the ether,” Goodman further suggests, such media “can easily escape notice, lurking somewhere beneath conscious perception.”33 Joyce, mobilizing gaslight as a trope, illuminates the medium by which perception is possible and, because gaslight is pointedly technological—as opposed to natural—casts as a narrative medium that which is in fact an infrastructural medium.

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The snow is immaterial to the imagined community; it is not a medium in the Aristotelian sense; and it is in any case a natural phenomenon that does not and cannot respect national boundaries. The opposition between a modernity embodied by Gabriel and a traditional or authentic Irishness embodied by Michael Furey is also false. The fact of the Galway gasworks—as immediately comparable to the Dublin gasworks—renders, instead, a modernity always already inscribed in every character and every location in “The Dead.” The transition to electricity in Dublin is, far from being an indication of the difference between the East and the West, an indication of the relentless pace of change within an all-encompassing modernity. The story is not to be taken as the work of mourning a transition between tradition and modernity, but rather between one modernity (gaslight) and another (electric light). “Here,” Kevin Whelan suggests, “lay Joyce’s most profound insight: the Irish in this condition were not deprived of modernity—they literally embodied it.”34 Michael Furey is in this sense embodied by the gasworks, an entirely modern institution with no links to any rural idyll or traditional culture. The real stakes in “The Dead” are between the newspapers (which are the public organs that report the snow to be “general all over Ireland”) and the gasworks (which are the public works that allow us to visualize the snow as “general all over Ireland”) (D 223). Michael and Gabriel are the opposing poles of nation building: the culture of the word versus engineering cultures, their antagonism exemplified in Gabriel’s sexual jealousy. The narrating voice of “The Dead” is the synthetic dissolution of the opposition between the two. Joyce marries them, realizing in the process the meaning of public works as both literary and infrastructural or, in Stiegler’s terms, technological. A “queer” marriage, to be sure, an eccentric one: but it is exactly this to which—in no small part—Joyce’s unique place in the modernist canon is to be attributed. NOTES 1. David Lodge, Thinks . . . (New York: Penguin, 2001), 44. 2. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (New York: Penguin, 1987), 1261. 3. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, “Ulysses in History,” in James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W. J. McCormack and Alistair Stead (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 126–141; Robert Adams Day, “Joyce’s AquaCities,” in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays, ed. Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: The State University of Ohio Press, 1996), 3–20; Joseph Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), especially 230–231; Michael Rubenstein, “‘The Waters of Civic Finance’: Moneyed States in Joyce’s Ulysses,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 36:3 (Summer 2003), 289–306; Leo Bersani, “Against Ulysses,” in James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Casebook, ed. Derek Attridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 201–230; and most

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

recently, Ariela Freedman, “Did It Flow? Bridging Aesthetics and History in Joyce’s Ulysses,” Modernism / Modernity 13:1 (January 2006), 853–868. Jameson, “Ulysses in History,” 140–141. Jameson, “Ulysses in History,” 140. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6. Auerbach, Mimesis, 7. Auerbach, Mimesis 5. Ibid., 552–553. Thank you to Michael Sayeau, who invited me to participate in his seminar “Modernist Simplicity” at the November 2007 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Long Beach, California, where he drew my attention to Auerbach’s work and particularly to the final passage of Mimesis. I make the case more thoroughly in my book, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010). Clive Hart, “Wandering Rocks,” in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 193. Hart, “Wandering Rocks,” 196. Hart, “Wandering Rocks,” 199. Michael Seidel, Epic Geography: James Joyce’s Ulysses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 183. See Chris Stillman, Robert Barklie, and Cathy Johnson, “Viking Iron-Smelting in Dublin’s Temple Bar West,” Geology Today 19:6 (November–December 2003), 216. For more about the play between time and space in “Wandering Rocks,” see also Luke Gibbons, “Spaces of Time Through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity,” Field Day Review 1 (2005), 71–85. A comparable thought experiment or stylistic exercise can be found in Bruno Latour’s Aramis or The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), where he intersperses— throughout his account of an automated public transportation system intended (but never implemented) in Paris—fi rst-person narrative vignettes that suppose the transit system itself as a narrating voice. That voice insists on being: “I am waiting for them all [engineers, politicians, perhaps Latour himself, etc.] to grant me being . . . What is a self? The intersection of all the acts carried out in its name. How can I become a being, an object, a thing— fi nally a self, yes, a full set, saturated with being—without them, without their agreement, without their coming to terms . . . How can I interest them all in me when they all love me differently? . . . The ‘I’ that humans receive at birth—that is precisely what has to be created for me” (200–202). The term is Homi Bhabha’s, from his “Sly Civility,” October 34 (Autumn 1985), 71–80. See especially 77–78, where Bhabha quotes the missionary frustration at recalcitrant natives who persist in their own religious beliefs by reinterpreting Christianity as capacious enough to accommodate them. I would simply suggest that in inventing a talking sewer, Joyce is working from within such sly civility. For more on the myths and meanings of the sewer, not in Dublin but in a comparative study of Paris and London, see David Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially Chapter 3, “Charon’s Bark.” See also, by the same author, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

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20. Hugo, Les Misérables, 1261. Hugo’s French reads, “L’égout, c’est la conscience de la ville.” See Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 4 vols. (Paris: Éditeurs Nelson, 1930) 4: 191. My thanks to Ann Banfield for directing me to this passage. 21. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 22. I am in some sense following on D. A. Miller’s assertion that the Victorian novel fulfi lls a policing function and that what he calls “panoptical narration” is “a kind of police.” “Panoptical narration” is better than omniscient narration because it fully situates the omniscient narrator within the ambitions of Victorian engineering culture and Benthamite Utilitarianism. In Joyce’s case, however, I would further gloss “police” as polis in order to drop the Foucauldian association with discipline, and I would assert, somewhat in contradistinction to Miller, that in Ulysses water and sanitation function as panoptical narrators whose mission is not discipline per se but governmentality more broadly. In Ulysses, a strong utopian element persists in the institution of the public works such that critics like Jameson and Leerssen pick up on it. The panoptical narrator in Ulysses is therefore not the same panoptical narrator of the Victorian novel, though the term is invaluable in slightly modified form, I think, for talking about modernism and Joyce in particular. See David Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 24. 23. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 13. 24. It is of interest to me that Alex Woloch uses this passage from Ulysses as an epigram to his chapter on Dickens’s Great Expectations, “Partings Welded Together: The Character-System in Great Expectations,” The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 178–243. He seems to imply, without performing a reading of the passage, that the “beingless beings” Stephen evokes in reference to the power plant might be part of his proposed novelistic “character-system” in some way. I would say: as a character, or as a part of the character-space, in the sense that, like Bloom in “Aeolus” but with more ambivalence, Stephen thinks of machines as beings that talk “in their own way” (U 7.175). 25. Critics have interpreted this passage variously. Andrew Gibson sees in Stephen’s “two roaring worlds” another allusion to his struggle against two masters, the Catholic Church and the British Empire. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99. Daniel R. Schwarz is the only other critic I’ve come across who really emphasizes the importance of the rapidly expanding technology of electricity in this passage: “Influenced by the Futurists and perhaps, too, by Constructivists and Suprematists, Joyce was fascinated by the possibilities of machines; as Stephen responds to the energy and power of machinery, we realize that the technique of ‘mechanics’ has a celebratory function [albeit one that goes seemingly unrecognized by Stephen here]. We recall, too, that Bloom had responded to the printing machines in ‘Aeolus’ in terms which anthropomorphized them . . . Isn’t the pumping heart a metaphor for the throbbing dynamos of the Dublin Corporation Electric Light Station which circulate—in the form of electricity and light—the necessary nourishment to the industrial city? That his heart responds rhythmically to the pulsations of the machine . . . not only validates his aesthetic credo for the man of genius—‘He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible’—but stretches it to include experiences beyond encounters with other people (U.213; IX.1041–2) . . . By using the heart as signifier of machinery and vice versa, Stephen is growing

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

into the writer who might write the Irish epic.” Daniel R. Schwarz, Reading Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Macmillan, 1987), 156–157. See Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 276. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000), 200. Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce (New York: James Joyce Society, 1950), 20. Quoted in Kevin Whelan, “The Memories of ‘The Dead’,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15:1 (2002), 69. Luke Gibbons, “‘Ghostly Light’: Spectres of Modernity in James Joyce’s and John Huston’s ‘The Dead’,” in The Blackwell Companion to James Joyce, ed. Richard Brown (London: Blackwell, 2008), 359. Gibbons, “‘Ghostly Light’,” 360–361. Gibbons, “‘Ghostly Light’,” 361. For more on the question of Gretta’s social mobility and her status as an internal migrant worker before her marriage to Gabriel, see Marjorie Howes’s chapter on James Joyce, “How Many People Has Gretta Conroy Killed?” in her Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History (Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2006), 79–93. Her essay focuses on Gretta as a figure for the Irish migrant woman whose difficult choices leave in their wake a number of broken hearts, violated class boundaries, and dead bodies. Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18. Goodman cites Aristotle’s defi nition of medium in his De Anima, given as a visual example and wholly applicable to Joyce’s use of gaslight in “The Dead”: “Democritus is mistaken in thinking that if the intervening space [to metaxu] were empty, even an ant in the sky would be clearly visible; for this is impossible. For vision occurs when the faculty of sense is affected; as it cannot be acted upon by the seen color [i.e., of the object] itself, there only remains the medium [to metaxu] to act on it, so that some medium [metaxu] must exist; in fact, if it [metaxu implied from previous clause] were empty, sight would not only be not accurate but we would see nothing altogether” (De Anima, 419a, 16–21, cited in Goodman, 18). Whelan, “The Memories of ‘The Dead’,” 65.

7

Disorienting Dublin Eric Bulson “L’existence, qui ne sera jamais trop déroutante . . . ”1 (Guy Debord, 1957)

ORIENT OR DISORIENT? Getting lost in Ulysses is not an experience that most readers welcome. In fact, an entire industry of literary maps and guidebooks has emerged over the past sixty years or so to keep readers oriented in the novel even as the buildings, streets, and businesses from the real city of Dublin disappeared. 2 These orientational devices have come in a variety of shapes and sizes, some outlining the historical context of every street, place-name, and landmark, others mapping out the itineraries of characters. 3 At the moment, there are so many different guides and maps to Dublin that the very idea of a deliberately disoriented reading might at fi rst seem preposterous, maybe even a little irresponsible. Why get lost in Ulysses when we don’t have to? That’s a question worth asking, especially in light of such a long, almost sacred topographical tradition that will no doubt continue far into the future. The empirical Dublin, one in which all the streets and landmarks cohere, has been prized above all the others. The topographical approach has dominated for so long, in fact, that the space of this fictional city has become reified. It is treated as a fi xed, stable representation just waiting for the diligent reader to pick up a map and decode. But there’s more than one way to read a map, and instead of thinking about Dublin’s maps as an antidote to lostness, this essay sees them as symptomatic of a much larger issue: Joyce’s Dublin disorients us. And the causes, as I will lay them out in this essay, are tied as much to shifts in modes of spatial representation as they are to historical and political contexts that have begun to inform our spatial understanding. Though we might be tempted by the stability of empirical data, the maps that we have already are imaginative projections and approximations, all of them engaged, on some level, in a process that involves making the oneto-one correspondence between a novelistic street and a point on a two-dimensional plane. This practice is riddled with problems. Navigating space in the novel is not the same thing as mapping it out. For starters, the space in the novel is bound to narrative time: places pass by in a sequence one after the other and come into focus gradually. A more complete cognitive

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image might appear after a while, but the temporal nature of narrative, with its sequencing, keeps the city from appearing by fi at. Literary mapping, then, is usually done after the novel has been read through and there is some time for reflection. Looking back, the literary cartographer can arrange all of the signposts into some kind of sequence, and this image, presumably, will reveal a secret layer, an archaeological stratum, underneath the narrative, one that holds all the parts together. Literary cartographers were around long before Ulysses arrived, and the practice has a complicated history that I will only allude to briefly here. At the end of the nineteenth century, literary cartography came into vogue because urbanization projects in London and Paris were bulldozing many of the sites that novelists like Dickens and Balzac had made famous.4 Scores of maps were made to preserve these cities as they were fast disappearing, and by the 1920s and 1930s, more than fi fty years after Dickens’s London and Balzac’s Paris had been radically reconfigured, two of the most ambitious atlases were produced.5 In both cases, the literary map was intended to piece together a lost world, one that could only be found in fragments. If part of the magic of realist novels came from the fact that they referred to real cities, then literary maps were meant to keep that magic alive by creating the false illusion that the complete city was still there. The systematic mapping of Ulysses fi rst undertaken by Clive Hart and Leo Knuth in 1975 (later updated and revised with the help of Ian Gunn in 2004) also began more than half a century after the novel was fi rst published. Dublin was still there, along with so many of its principal thoroughfares, but with time passing more and more businesses were gone, with independence streets were renamed, and even a few of the statues were destroyed by IRA bombings. There were more informal attempts before this, often with photographs instead of maps, but this particular version was motivated by the desire to plot out every twist and turn, and re-present the novel as a collection of consumable, user-friendly images. Mapping Dublin, then and now, did not help to explain why the space of this city was so disorienting in the fi rst place. And it was an exercise that pointed to something even stranger: Ulysses was one of the most disorienting and mappable novels ever written. Readers did not feel lost because there were no signs to follow. Just the opposite was true: more than five hundred different street signs and place-names littered these pages, presumably to keep readers from feeling out of place. Trying to figure out just why Dublin disorients was a subject fi rst picked up in earnest by the postcolonial critics interested in Dublin’s imperial history.6 They were particularly keen to address how the representation of the city was coded with political and historical messages, many of them deeply embedded in the novel. For Enda Duffy, the “unfamiliar streets” automatically positioned readers as imperialist outsiders, who are made to feel as if they are experiencing “the colonial city for the fi rst time.”7 In the postcolonial paradigm, disorientation has a political valence, one that should make

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readers question what belonging to a nation under colonial domination means. There has also been some attention to the history of cartography in Ireland and the way that it complicates the politics of space in Ulysses.8 Responding to critics like Duffy, Jon Hegglund argues that Dublin is, in part, the product of a topographical gaze linked to the history of British imperialism, but there is more than one way to imagine the city: “Just as maps can confer the possession of a territory, they can likewise become a means to imagine new articulations of space.”9 Hegglund, unfortunately, does not expand further on this idea of “new articulations,” but he gestures toward the very possibility that this spatial experience reflects an imperial perspective that can be resisted and, in effect, turned inside out. The postcolonial turn has made it impossible for us to ignore the spatial politics of Ulysses. And yet before the arrival of postcolonial questions in the 1980s and 1990s, this was not the case. There was very little emphasis on the historical and political contexts embedded in the city or a consideration of the effects they produce in readers. But the historicity of our own modes of interpretation should stand as a valuable warning. The map of Dublin was there for decades, but it was not always read from the same angle, with the same assumptions, and with the same scale and legend in mind. Which is another way of saying that the Dublin of Ulysses doesn’t change, we do. Every generation of readers comes to this novel with a different set of ideas about how the space can be imagined, represented, mediated, and decoded.10 For that very reason, Ulysses will not always look and feel the same way. It would be infi nitely rewarding to go back in time and ask the original readers of Ulysses what Dublin looked like. If a similar experiment was to be administered now, I’m confident that the results would be more or less the same: disorientation is the norm, one that leads readers to the maps and guidebooks like horses to the trough. But the biggest difference, I suspect, would have to do with the kinds of orientational tools and strategies they use, directly or indirectly, to mediate their experience. Nowadays, it’s easier to look up a street sign on Google than it is to track down a volume in the library (unless of course you own it already, or find it uploaded on Google Books). Just think how, in the past few years, the arrival of a service like Google Street Maps has fundamentally changed the kind of access that individuals have to cartographic information. Streets around the globe can be called up with the click of a mouse (satellite function), and it is possible to zoom down into the street (from a photograph) and move the camera in angles north, south, east, west. And Google Street Maps is only the beginning of a digital cartography that will continue to influence the spatial imagination of every individual with access to a computer. Joyce’s own spatial imagination was the product of a particular time and place. In one of the few biographical accounts we have of his writing habits, we see him hovering above a map of Dublin and drawing on it with a red pen:

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Eric Bulson To see Joyce at work on the Wandering Rocks was to see an engineer at work with compass and slide-rule, a surveyor with theodolite and measuring chain or, more Ulyssean perhaps, a ship’s officer taking the sun, reading the log and calculating current drift and leeway . . . Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city.11

This passage is usually cited as an example of Joyce’s love of hard facts, the novelist as cartographer in search of la rue juste. But it tells us something else: Joyce could not possibly keep track of the space of an episode like “Wandering Rocks” on his own no matter how prodigious his memory was. He needed that map to orchestrate his urban symphony. And it wasn’t just any map: Joyce used an Ordnance Survey map, the miniaturized version reprinted in Thom’s Dublin Directory. The Ordnance Survey of Ireland, undertaken by the British Empire between 1824 and 1846, was an extraordinary achievement in cartographic history, and it helped consolidate Britain’s economic, commercial, cultural, and political control over Ireland. Which makes you think about the wonderful irony of having an Irish novelist like Joyce using that same image to generate a representation of Dublin almost a century later, and keep readers guessing if it’s okay to lose track of the street names or direction of the characters. To get lost or not to get lost? That’s the question that every reader faces with Ulysses. Since we’ve already had such a productive topographical past, it’s now time to enlarge our perspective on the city and learn to get lost in it both with the map Joyce left behind but also with the ones that will be compiled, collated, cut up, and circulated in the future. A critical mode of readerly disorientation will require adjusting some of the fundamental ways we think about the representational space of the novel and the spatial imagination of the reader. But such a foray into a more experimental spatial experience will make us see Dublin as something other than a space waiting to have the cartographic dots connected. Indeed, it is comforting to think that Joyce wanted us to feel at home in Dublin, but this essay is meant to signal the alarm bell and argue for something else: Dublin has been and always will be disorienting.

NAME OR DESCRIBE? These are two of the most popular techniques that novelists rely on to represent space, and they are a pretty accurate way of gauging where and when novels were written. For his influential study of the “chronotope,” a term that can be defi ned literally as “time-space,” Mikhail Bakhtin went all the way back to a handful of Greek and Hellenistic novels written between the second and fourth centuries B.C. and argued that there was a shift from

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abstract to concrete space that affected the structure and design of plot.12 The Greek romances, in particular, required a rather wide panorama for their adventure plots, and the geography had to be abstract and vaguely defi ned for there to be “chance,” which he defi ned as the narrative engine behind events. Concrete space, in these novels, would make chance less believable and, as a result, change was what was possible in the fictional world itself. A little closer to the twentieth century another “chronotopic” revolution occurred. It was one generated, in part, by the novelist’s discovery of the streets, boulevards, byways, and back alleys of the modern city. Dickens, Zola, and Balzac spent their entire careers mapping out the nooks and crannies of their beloved metropoles and, in the process, they influenced how scores of readers were able to imagine them. Modernists like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Alfred Döblin were also bringing the city to the novel, but their representational strategies were radically different. Street and place-names are still there, but the objective description has largely disappeared. In addition, a third-person narrator can be found, but it is one who seems to be there primarily to drop the occasional signpost as the characters walk around. What happened? There are a number of possibilities, but I think it’s worth following the popular notion that there was a crisis in the experience of time and space that challenged novelists to come up with modern ways to represent it. By the first few decades of the twentieth century, realist modes of spatial representation were already outmoded. Joyce and others experimented with montage to produce effects of simultaneity, but there was an even more radical discovery: interior monologue. Monologue intérieur was, as Joyce himself admitted, an invention of Edouard Dujardin in Les lauriers sont coupés. But if it was Dujardin who discovered how such a technique provided an unmediated peek into the minds of characters, it was Joyce who adapted it fully to the urban environment.13 Interior monologue put the body in the city and let readers tag along for the ride and stride. But as every reader of Ulysses is forced to notice, the third-person narrator, with the exception of “Penelope,” never disappears entirely. And this divide between the narrator and the minds-bodies of characters ends up producing two Dublins that do not necessarily match up. There is a rupture between the realist and modernist city, and it is one that rests on a simple opposition: realists describe space, modernists name it. Here I am tweaking a distinction made by Georg Lukacs in his essay “Narrate or Describe?” in which he is concerned exclusively with realist modes of representation.14 Using the scenes of two famous horse races, one from Zola’s Nana, the other from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Lukacs explains that readers can either witness the events from the perspective of an observer or from the perspective of a participant. Zola is the one realist guilty of observation. By describing the scene from without, readers experience the events from a distance and never quite see themselves

130 Eric Bulson in the world of the characters. In Tolstoy, on the other hand, the events are narrated from within, and the reader occupies the perspective of the participant, who is literally in the crowd among the people. For Lukacs, narration is superior to description in the novel because it allows readers to imagine themselves in the world and not outside of it. And this experience, mediated as it is by the form of the novel, is an effective antidote to a capitalist system that alienates the modern individual, rendering her passive, cold, calculating, and completely unable to see herself as part of a larger social totality. If description in the novel is just another expression of capitalism’s awesome power to alienate, then narration is its antidote, an effective strategy that gives readers the chance to feel “at home in the fictional world.”15 Though novelistic space is not one of Lukacs’ concerns in this essay, his distinction can, with some adjustment, be a useful way to explain the difference between realist description and modernist naming. Both techniques are, generally speaking, ways to bring the world to the reader through the pages of a novel. But techniques of representation, spatial and otherwise, belong to particular times and places and come with their own biases, assumptions, and culturally conceived value systems. The spatial description of nineteenth-century novels is very often linked up with the post-Enlightenment rise of objectivity with its drive to ferret out and catalogue knowledge in all its forms. Critics often talk about the space of the early twentieth-century novel in the same way, referencing a cartographic impulse that goes back at least as far as Don Quixote (and farther if we follow Bakhtin’s genealogy). Modernist naming, however, should not be treated as a simple departure from realist description. It represents a defi nitive and lasting break in the history of the novel, one that continues to influence how writers imagine and represent urban and non-urban spaces alike. Naming and not describing the space of the city changes what the city looks like, how characters interact with it, and how readers respond. And there are, generally speaking, two perspectives on the space of the city in the modernist novel: the topographical gaze of a third-person narrator and the streetlevel gaze of city-dwellers like Bloom, Clarissa Dalloway, and Franz Biberkopf. In all of these works, the narrator chimes in with geographical signposts, but they are present in the novel so that readers can keep tabs on where characters are going. The locals, who are making their way across the city, do not, for obvious reasons, need them. Locals don’t read street signs. The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) are a good example of the realist description I’ve been talking about so far: London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the

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earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.16 Here we have a third-person, omniscient narrator, who provides a condensed panoramic view that begins with the reference to London before moving to a specific neighborhood, Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Readers may know that “Lincoln’s Inn Hall” and “Holborn Hill” are real places in London, but it doesn’t really matter for the orientation effect of this passage to work. There is a formal unity to this particular image of the city, one that comes from the connections the narrator establishes between the place-names, which are woven together with sensory details about the smell, temperature, and overall mood of the place. Not knowing the exact location of Lincoln’s Inn Hall within London has no impact on the reader’s ability to orient the scene. In the opening lines of “Lotus-Eaters,” the fi rst exclusively urban episode of Ulysses, the situation is quite different: By lorries along sir John Rogerson’s quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office. Could have given that address too. And past the sailors’ home. He turned from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street . . . He crossed Townsend street, passed the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth. And past Nichols’ the undertaker. At eleven it is. Time enough . . . In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend, fi nest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. (U 5. 1–19) Dublin is here in these lines, but where exactly do you fi nd it? Instead of providing the fog, muddy streets, the probability for Megalosaurus sightings, and other descriptive details to stitch it all together, the narrator pinpoints specific locations, each one passing by like items on a laundry list. Readers get lots of street and place-names, but they do not automatically morph into a unified image, one that would make them cohere. In fact, the reader who picks up Ulysses without any prior geographical knowledge of Dublin whatsoever will wonder why there are so many references in the fi rst place. Frank Budgen was the fi rst reader to figure out what Joyce was up to: But it is not by way of description that Dublin is created in Ulysses. There is a wealth of delicate pictorial evocation in Dubliners, but there is little or none in Ulysses. Streets are named but never described . . . Bridges over the Liffey are crossed and recrossed, named and that is all. We go into eating-houses and drinking bars as if the town were our own and these customary ports of call. Libraries, churches, courthouses,

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Eric Bulson the municipal government, professional associations function before us without explanations or introductions.17

“Streets are named but never described,” Budgen tells us. “Bridges . . . are named and that is all,” he says. If there is a difference between realist and modernist urban space, it is here in this shift from description to naming. Dublin does not appear by way of descriptions from an omniscient narrator. Instead, it is quickly referenced by one who acts more like a breathless tour guide unable to tell the difference between signs that matter and signs that don’t. And this is where the connection between naming and disorientation arises. Contrary to what Budgen says here, naming is not the best way to welcome readers. In fact, the sheer abundance of street signs and place names has a way of making some readers, most readers, feel as if they should know where they are. And feeling as if you should know where you are is a reminder that you’re not where you should be. Here and throughout Ulysses, mainly between “Lotus-Eaters” and “Wandering Rocks,” the narrator names Dublin. When comparing the fi nal version of “Lotus-Eaters” with the one fi rst published in the Little Review (July 1918), you see that this technique was in place early on in the composition of the novel. No one traverses the entire city by foot in a single episode, so Dublin is made up of walks that begin and end abruptly often without any explanation about where characters go when they disappear in between episodes.18 In order to provide more expansive views of Dublin than would fit into the one-hour time slots, Joyce incorporates alternative modes of transport. “Hades” and “Wandering Rocks” are two poignant examples: both of them include carriages that move diagonally across Dublin thereby allowing the narrative to cover a greater distance. In “Aeolus,” Joyce found another way to dilate the geography of Dublin, though this time the tram lines are put in a row one after the other: “Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and Upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross” (U 7.4–6). Dublin, then, is made up of narrators who read street signs and locals who don’t. But there is also a third option: the narrator who occasionally sees or describes the city like a local. It’s a version of free indirect discourse in which the narrator takes on the voice of the character, but with the presence of interior monologue it can be difficult to figure out who is saying what when. This slippage begins in the very fi rst line of “Lotus-Eaters” when the post office comes into view: “By lorries along sir John Rogerson’s quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office. Could have given that address too. And past the sailors’ home” (U 5.1–3). The route unfolds here one street sign at a time, but before long, the narrator’s mind and Bloom’s mind collide. Who, after all, names the “postal telegraph office”? It’s formal enough to sound like the narrator (postal telegraph office instead of post office), but

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the subsequent line, “Could have given that address too,” indicates that this location has caught Bloom’s eye as well. The gaze of the narrator and Bloom intersect here, but what makes it even more complicated is the sentence that follows (“And past the sailors’ home”). Here, we don’t have the official name of the business (“Sailors’ Home and Shipwrecked Mariner’s Society”), and the sentence itself, a fragment, sounds like it belonged to the other signposts before being broken off by Bloom’s thought. This confusion between the perspective of narrator and character can be found in “Lestrygonians” as well, a chapter fi lled with the unofficial names of places that would only make any real sense to someone with local knowledge. In the second paragraph, for instance, we fi nd that “[a] sombre Y.M.C.A young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham Lemon’s, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom” (U 8.5–6). What and where is Graham Lemon’s? Here we get a place-name, no street address. Most readers would have no idea that it’s a candy store on Lower Sackville Street. Bloom is near it apparently because the “sweet fumes” are all around him. Direction in this example is insinuated more than it is explicitly stated. Later on when another topographical signpost comes up, the narrator, speaking like a local, tells us that Bloom “crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish fi nger” (U 8.414). To figure this location out, you would need to know that Thomas Moore is dead, but a bronze statue of him could be found on College Street across from Trinity College. This kind of indirect, informal naming is everywhere in Ulysses. Third-person narrators may like to give directions, but they are more often than not intended for someone with a very deep understanding of the city’s history and geography. Any discussion of the disorientation effect of Ulysses is incomplete without at least some consideration of “Wandering Rocks.” Mapped out with a red pen, this particular episode is the one that famously sidetracks even the most alert reader. But in “Wandering Rocks,” it’s not the same kind of disorientation that we experience with the earlier episodes. No matter how attenuated or allusive the naming process can be in “Lotus-Eaters” or “Lestrygonians,” the street and place-names never exceed twenty-five and they are focused more or less on the itinerary of a single character. In the nineteen individual sections of “Wandering Rocks,” however, readers fi nd hundreds of topographical signposts. But even this amplification is less problematic than the dramatic leaps and bounds that happen in between the individual sections or the narrative interpolations that Joyce plants to signal the simultaneity of events far away. Throughout “Wandering Rocks,” we follow a narrator with a short attention span. It hovers over the city, randomly hones in on unsuspecting Dubliners down below, stays for a little while, before moving on. In the sixth section, for instance, we fi nd Stephen Dedalus and Almidano Artifoni chatting in front of Trinity College; in the seventh section, two blocks away, we are in Blazes Boylan’s office; in the eighth section we are on the north side

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of the Liffey at the old chapterhouse of Mary’s Abbey; by the ninth section, we are back on the south side of the Liffey on Dame Street with Lenehan, and so on. Mapping these individual sections in search of coherence is a convenient strategy, but I think it’s the response readers should avoid, particularly if it’s their goal to act like locals. Though urban theorists will tell you that fragmentation, the inability to produce a cognitive map, reflects degrees of alienation, the opposite is true in “Wandering Rocks.” Fragmentation is an effect of belonging to this city, and we see it again and again in these urban vignettes that Joyce has so carefully constructed. They are quick snapshots of the city, through the bodies and minds of characters at street level. None of them are capable of knowing where everyone is, and that limited temporal and spatial knowledge highlights the fact that this perspective is reserved for God only. And in this particular example, the bird’s-eye view is for narrators, fictional constructions who are capable of seeing the city in a way that no character can. In the famous coda of “Wandering Rocks,” we get the spatial counterpoint to the street-level perspective of the characters. In this instance, we follow the Earl of Dudley and Lady Dudley in their carriage as they pass out of the viceregal lodge in Phoenix Park and move diagonally across Dublin. It is a condensed staging of their route through a large portion of the city punctuated all along by the mixed reactions of the Dubliners passing by on foot. Sitting in the comfort of the carriage, they are quite literally raised above the streets, but the humor of this section comes from the fact that the narrator, who seems to have taken on their voice or is mocking it, misreads most of the expressions, salutes, and gestures of the citizens. Which makes you wonder, in fact, if the detached perspective from above is really all that desirable. In this instance, at least, it suggests that the Earl of Dudley and Lady Dudley are out of touch, physically distant from Dublin as they sit in the carriage, but also emotionally distant, without any real knowledge of what goes on in the minds of these passing subjects. For most of “Wandering Rocks,” we move through the minds of characters, but the presence of an omniscient third-person narrator keeping track of their every move does not automatically suggest an intimacy with the people or the place. In fact, this episode stages, in a way that the other ones do not, the real tension that exists between the official and unofficial spatial perspectives on Dublin: one from up above, the other down below. Seeing the city at a glance cannot always be conflated with an imperial perspective, but in this instance it’s hard to ignore the fact that seeing the city from above is what the narrator, Earl of Dudley and Lady Dudley do. As readers, we can respond to the street signs and place-names in different ways. There’s always the choice of simply ignoring them. Bloom does. But unless you’re a local like Bloom, I don’t recommend it. The distracted response encourages a departicularized reading of Dublin. If you don’t care where the street signs are, Dublin could be anywhere. That’s what Ezra Pound fi rmly believed. He was convinced that Dublin didn’t matter at all

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to the Ulysses experience. If the Earl of Dudley and Lady Dudley are any indication, you will also want to avoid believing that topographical precision from above is the best way of gaining control of the city. Still, if you do care to know “where” the street signs are, it’s hard to get away from the fact that you will anchor your reading in some image of Dublin. I am not recommending here that we rely on maps for a quick fi x. Rather, I think we need to come up with different ways to read the maps we already have and rethink how they can be made in the future. The approach I’m recommending here is counterintuitive: we can use maps to get us lost in Ulysses.

READER OR DÉRIVEUR? As a way to get started, it’s worth remembering Walter Benjamin’s own experiments with Berlin, the city he grew up in at the end of the nineteenth century. From childhood, Benjamin was always troubled by a “very poor sense of direction,” and it was not until the age of thirty that he fi nally figured out the difference between right and left. Getting to know Berlin at such a late stage in his life was contingent on learning to get lost in it. It was an experience, he remembers fondly in “A Berlin Chronicle,” that called “for quite a different schooling.”19 This willful spatial disorientation involved using street maps of the city he knew so well to redirect his movements, and he discovered that in the process of making the familiar foreign his senses actually woke up. This is not the alienated urban experience described by Georg Simmel in his classic essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Instead of retreating inward to protect himself against the shocks of the metropolis, Benjamin invited them, waiting patiently for the external stimuli to break through. For his urban experiments in Berlin, Benjamin was following the lead of the Surrealists, a group that celebrated different modes of disorientation and used every alleyway, boulevard, and back alley as an entry into the unconscious. André Breton’s Nadja, a book that Benjamin very much admired, is, among other things, a map of Paris that Breton made to reconstruct a doomed love affair. Black-and-white photographs of empty Parisian streets, cafés, and restaurants are scattered randomly throughout these pages, and when combined with the narrator’s pseudo-autobiographical ramblings, they seem haunted, like the images of a postapocalyptic city in which the buildings are still miraculously standing. These photographs document the urban spaces the Surrealists loved most, many of them in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, hidden from sight. Modernists working with a variety of different media were interested in the disorientation effects of the modern city. The Futurists adapted painting (in particular with the topographical gaze in “aeropittura”); the Surrealists incorporated photographs into novels estranging the city from the local inhabitants; critics like Benjamin experimented with prose and headings

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in a work like Einbahnstrasse (“One-Way Street”) to administer cognitive shocks on the reader. And they weren’t alone. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, there was a widespread awareness that urbanization had radically reconfigured the space of the city, and modernization, with its new communication and transport technologies, was speeding up everyday life at an alarming pace. As much as modernists were aware of the situation, many of their urban experiments were an uncritical product of it. Disorientation was very much a part of daily life, but instead of combating it they were still trying to come up with techniques for its realistic representation. When the avant-garde collective known as the Situationists came on the scene in the late 1950s, this would all change. Disorientation was at the very center of their program for social, political, and artistic revolution. The urbanization and modernization that began in the mid-nineteenth century had effectively transformed the city into the kind of capitalist space that encourages consumption over production. The urban dweller quickly became synonymous with the modern consumer, who lives on credit, someone who has been so brainwashed by the capitalist system that even the simple act of walking the street has been programmed and predetermined. This is where disorientation comes in. If you want to resist the system, you need to come up with tactics that will allow you to break free from the patterns, habits, and ideologies it conceals. Disorientation had it all: it was, quite literally, a modus vivendi, an expression of one’s autonomy, and a way to resist the political and commercial ideologies concealed within the urban architecture. Paris was their preferred city, the ideal place for a form of aimless wandering, which they called the dérive. Defi ned literally as “the drift,” the dérive was a Situationist exercise that involved walking through the streets without any prescribed itinerary, direction, or destination. As Guy Debord explains in an essay by the same name, this activity was not to be confused with the leisurely stroll or the walk of the fl âneur, the nineteenth-century bourgeois figure who sauntered through the arcades. It was, strictly speaking, the random movement through the city in which one could break from the habitual routes used in daily life, many of them organized around the principal thoroughfares fi rst designed by Baron von Haussman in the mid to late nineteenth century. There were rules for every dérive, most of them involving practical considerations like duration (a few hours or days), location (including meeting point and time), number of participants (small groups preferred), and modes of transportation (taxis and other motor vehicles sometimes allowed). For the Situationists, the dérive was a way of “letting go,” the fi rst step toward understanding just how the urban environment affects the intellectual and emotional life of the individual. Every walk down the street generates feelings, ideas, memories, desires, and sensations, each one of them affected by everything from the design of the buildings to the layout of the streets. In one of the foundational manifestoes for the movement,

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Ivan Chtcheglov described the ideal Situationist City as a space divided into districts that would correspond with particular emotions. “The principal activity of the inhabitants” he imagined, “will be the CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in complete disorientation.”20 Indeed, Chtcheglov’s city was more fantasy than reality, but from the beginning of the movement, he had identified one of the principal goals of the Situationists: a never-ending dérive in which the city was shaping and being shaped by the feelings, moods of the dériveur. “Psychogeography” was another keyword in the Situationist lexicon, and it was defi ned rather loosely as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”21 For Debord and the others, it was only by studying this cause-and-effect relationship between the built environment and the interiority of the urban dweller that the space of the city could be properly decoded. A majority of their projects were collages that had been compiled from photographs, guidebooks, advertisements, and maps. The superimposition of different maps was also a popular exercise, and in his “Theory of the Dérive,” Debord recounts the story of one Situationist who arrived in the Harz Mountains (Germany) with a map of London. These “psychogeographic maps” could help clarify “certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences.”22 They were, in other words, both the tools that could produce effects of disorientation and the data through which the logic of spatial orientation could be analyzed, understood, and, when possible, resisted. The Naked City: Illustration de l’hypothése [sic] des plaques tournantes en psychogeographique [sic] is one of the more complex examples of what a psychogeographic map could actually do. It includes cartographic fragments representing eighteen Parisian neighborhoods and landmarks (originally cut out from a guide), all of which have been rearranged in no particular order. The red arrows that appear individually and in clusters suggest possible routes for circulation and points of connection (and disconnection). Paris, in this image, has been fragmented and decentered: there are no cardinal points, and spaces that may be geographically distant in reality achieve an imaginary contiguity. It may at fi rst glance look as if this map has been haphazardly thrown together, but The Naked City was the product of hours of drifting and figuring out what parts of the city attract and repel the individual. 23 Because Paris is still recognizable on this map, even in pieces, it can be tempting to try and put them back “in order.” That, however, would be a mistake. The fragmentation of Paris on The Naked City map was intended to disrupt the habitual ways that the city is both represented and processed on a two-dimensional plane. Paris is seen here from a topographical perspective, but instead of a totalizing view there are jagged and misshapen

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pieces that provide unexpected connections between them. Psychogeographic maps like this one are meant to reinforce the idea that spatial imagining is not a passive process, something that happens to you: seeing the world requires the active participation of the viewer, who has the power to insert herself back in the landscape. There’s a lot more to say about how this map works and what it means, but I want to limit my point: maps have been adapted over time as instruments of power, ways to count, control, cordon off, and kill individuals. But by taking apart and reassembling a popular cartographic image, the Situationists found ways to transform them into signs of protest. A map-inspired form of disorientation was not an end in itself: it was a beginning, a way to think about what the city, and the world at large, could look and feel like. What can the Situationists teach us about the space of Ulysses? Can the reader ever be a dériveur, someone who can learn to resist the prescribed spatial habits that are already so fi rmly entrenched in the critical tradition? By way of an answer, I want to return to an excerpt from Potlatch, one of the early bulletins of the Situationists, in which an anonymous author, possibly Guy Debord, describes the experience of reading an Irish map and draws attention to “l’aspect engageant de certaines localités en Irlande et ailleurs, qui figurent sur les cartes géographiques générales en couleur ou sur les cartes partielles d’état-major avec des échelles et des hachures.”24 This passage might sound familiar to French readers because it is an exact translation from the moment in “Ithaca” describing Bloom’s experience as a map reader: “The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad, as represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or in special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and hachures” (U 17.1969–1972). There is nothing in this article indicating that this passage is a direct quotation from Ulysses. 25 Those who pick up on it can see that there is a particular logic involved here: they’ve chosen one of the few passages in the text that mentions maps specifically. The only major difference between the original passage from Ulysses and the French translation comes in the last line, and it is one that shows a keen understanding of Bloom at the end of the day, someone still convinced that he belongs to Ireland. Far from being the outcast, outsider, black sheep, exile, or émigré, he is the “organism destined to function in this environment.” That’s not alienation, abstraction or defeat. The map in this instance conceals a narrative of Bloom’s victory; he is someone capable of imagining himself inside, not outside, the space that is represented on the page. The author of this passage has identified something about Bloom that has gone unnoticed: he is a détourneur and dériveur, a character on an eighteen-hour dérive, who superimposes his emotions, desires, and dreams on the maps he reads. Instead of alienating him from Dublin, Ireland, or the world, these maps affi rm the fact that he has as much of a right to walk the streets of Dublin as anyone else.

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And this image of Bloom as a map-reader or map-dreamer, brings us back to that other dériveur, Joyce himself, the one who, as Budgen tells us fi rst-hand, traced out the routes of characters on a map of Dublin with a red pen when he was writing Ulysses. Joyce, of course, was not staging an attack on the abstract space of capitalism, at least not consciously anyway, but he was putting the Dublin map to a new use: taking a historical document, the Ordnance Survey, which was once meant to affi rm and consolidate Britain’s control of Ireland in the nineteenth century, and using it to piece together a fictional story about a single day in Dublin at the dawn of the twentieth century. If that is not an example of a Situationist-style détournement, then what is? In order to imagine his native city, Joyce not only wrote on the map in front of him; he cut it up by rearranging the parts in prose (emphasizing some locations while ignoring others), and, in the process, produced a novelistic representation of Dublin that would be imageless, one that could not be seen at a glance from above but in sequence according to syntactical rules and narrative time. By transforming a cartographic image of Dublin, with its own history, into a novelistic representation, Joyce subverted the original. The Ordnance Survey, then, has been adapted from within, used to transmit another message about Irish geography, history, and politics. For Bloom and Joyce alike, the map is not a static image imposing order on Dublin from without. Rather, it is an image in progress that changes over time, takes on new stories, and can be adapted to entirely different ends depending on who is reading, and, in some cases, writing on it. Joyce (and Bloom) as a Situationist, then: there is something to this idea. Dublin, for him, was as real as it was imagined, and by the time he was writing Ulysses, maps, guidebooks, and other devices became integral to the production of this space. He was not simply out to reproduce a complete image of Dublin, even if he boasted that you could reconstruct one from the pages of his novel. He was taking the space of Dublin apart, rebuilding it according to a highly personalized and erratic system of signs that he put in order himself. I’ve talked already about the disorientation effect that these signs can have on readers. They pop up in the novel but not because characters like Bloom are looking for them. They are there in place of an objective description, and they signal the divide that exists in the novel between the city, the narrator, and the characters. When you plot out these signs on a map, arrange them one by one, and look for patterns, coherence, and unity, Dublin does not come into focus: it disappears. There are readers who will always prefer an empirical, oriented version of Dublin to a disoriented one. And for them, the work has been done thanks to the meticulous research of Hart, Knuth, and Gunn. But for the rest of us who believe that the empirical map is just one way to imagine the space of this city, and a deceptively factual one at that, it is worth considering a few alternatives. One of them is pretty straightforward: draw a map of Dublin on your own. Vladimir Nabokov did this when he was teaching Ulysses at

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Cornell University. It was a way for him to keep track of Bloom, Stephen, and the Blind Stripling as they move from episode to episode. The maps Nabokov drew by hand in the margins of his copy of Ulysses (Random House, 1934 edition) and for various lecture notes are such a compelling example because they reveal a basic desire for some kind of spatial organization that will keep all the parts intact. Nabokov, in other words, was not about to get lost in Dublin, and his map of the novel provides evidence that he spent a great deal of time superimposing the action of the individual episodes on an image of Dublin not drawn to scale and filled with distortions (look, for instance, at the geographical closeness of England).26 In these maps, Nabokov is still very much concerned with some kind of spatial organization (and admits to consulting Patricia Hutchins’s James Joyce’s Dublin [1950] to do so), and his sketch is even oriented on a north– south axis with the Liffey in the middle, but this highly personalized map sketch was one way for him to figure out how the narrative worked, and it represents a particular kind of cartographic engagement that has been lost. It’s a celebration of the positivistic aspect of Joyce’s fiction, but the cancellations and erasures on the map also make it emphasize the importance that comes from mistakes in human perception, all of them involving wrong turns, blind alleys, distorted scales, and missed connections. And looking at the arrows that appear individually and in clusters, we can be reminded of The Naked City, compiled at the same time. Nabokov has put them on the page to signify movement and direction in and between episodes, but when mapped out in this way they resemble currents in a chaotic whirlpool, and instead of leading only to one destination, every arrow highlights a path not taken through Dublin. A negative image of Dublin is something still waiting to be developed, something that Nabokov produced with his own map without being aware that it was even there. As I said, this is an early example, and Nabokov is still a reader in search of a hidden topography that organizes the narrative structure and corresponds to a real place in the world. But just think how this simple act of mapping in the margins, on paper, with photographs, or with a virtual map, can expand the way we think about the space in the novel itself. What Nabokov did with a pen and paper is really what every reader can do regardless of how well he or she actually knows the space of the novel or the real city of Dublin. One exercise, in fact, might involve keeping track of street signs and other orientational landmarks in the novel and recording the impressions they produce episode by episode. There’s also the possibility for mixed-media projects: a copy of the novel could conceivably become the basis for a Situationist-inspired collage piece complete with photographic, cartographic images, street signs highlighted, cut out, or renamed, and geographical passages pasted in from other literary works. One reader based in Dublin has begun a collaborative project that uses Google Maps as a starting point for “Joyce Walks” around the globe. The rules of the game are quite simple: an episode of Ulysses is plotted out on a map of Dublin,

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and the design of the walk that emerges is then remapped onto the layout of another city. So far, these walks have been conducted in Mexico City, Berlin, Tokyo, and Jundiai (Brazil), documented using Google Maps, and shared on the web.27 What’s particularly striking about such a project is the way that it emphasizes the power that fictional landscapes have on the way we imagine our own towns, cities, and landscapes in the present. They are not simply fictions that stay on the page: we carry them with us in our heads, and they take shape and often guide us through our everyday lives. The opportunities for psychogeographical experiments with Ulysses are many. And there is really no way to predict in advance what would happen if readers began to think of themselves more as dériveurs, who produce space, and less as readers who passively consume it. At the moment a lot can be learned from “experimental geography” and “radical cartography” projects already in place.28 One of them, “Notes for a People’s Atlas,” involves residents from Chicago, who collaborate on a digital map of the city by contributing local knowledge about the spaces in which they live, work, and play. Based on the results of the participants, the maps develop organically into a multilayered frame that reveal hundreds, sometimes thousands, of different networks organizing the city.29 And they include all kinds of information from the distribution of dumpsters and trash to the places where you are most likely to get mugged.30 The designers behind this project have made the medium available, but the message is left largely to the public, who has the power to change what gets represented. The space of the city, then, is made by the people who live in it, and it is as much a product of the imagination as it is a concrete, lived reality. A digital project of this sort would, no doubt, represent an alternative to the topographical approach already in place. Instead of treating the novel and the map as a static image with all the answers, Dublin would become a work in progress, a space always in the process of becoming. This kind of collaboration would, in the end, make other urban imaginaries available, creating communities of like-minded readers, but also highlighting the inevitable differences that exist as well. Not every one will see the city in the same way. It should already be apparent from the argument I’ve been making that Dublin might be named in the novel, but it is not there in the novel waiting to be decoded by a master plotter; the city comes alive in the imagination of every reader who picks up Ulysses, the one who consciously and unconsciously tries to assemble it from a storehouse of images and other geographical, cartographic, literary, historical, social, economic, and political associations. There is no ideal dériveur for Ulysses, and as the novel continues to circulate around the globe and across the generations, the space of Dublin will expand even more, opening itself up to mediations, superimpositions, juxtapositions, and “detournings” that have yet to be accomplished. Treating Ulysses as a map in progress emphasizes its timeliness. The codes, legends, layouts will change mostly because readers will find other things to look for beyond the street signs that are and are not there on the

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page. Ulysses is, above all, a map Joyce made to keep Dublin from disappearing. But it is so filled with gaps, omissions, and absences, that even the most diligent urban planner would have a difficult time using Joyce’s novelistic representation as a blueprint. The city may be filled with signposts that can be plotted out on a map grid, but it is the body of Bloom, Stephen, and the other Dubliners that provide us with an intimate perspective on what the city looks, smells, and feels like. As readers shadowing them throughout the day, we register these sensations, and, at times, we experience our own bouts of absent-mindedness, fatigue, aimlessness, and disorientation. Before reaching for a map of Dublin, however, I would recommend something else: why not try one with a representation of Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, or Berlin? A cartographic exercise of this sort is the surest way of making us understand that Dublin did not come into being only with Ordnance Survey maps, guidebooks, and directories. It was shaped by the real and imagined topographies of cities like “Trieste-Zürich-Paris,” the hyphenated list of proper nouns that appear right below Molly Bloom’s “Yes.” There are many ways that we can interpret this hyphenated list: it times and places the novel during the Great War and subtly reminds us that these pages were composed from a real geographical distance. But “Trieste-Zurich-Paris” is also an address for the novel itself, and a provocative one at that, waiting for readers who might be tricked into thinking that by reaching the last page they have fi nally mastered the streets, lanes, and alleys of Dublin, wherever that is. NOTES 1. “Life, which can never be too disorienting . . .” This passage is only a fragment of one that reads: “L’existence, qui ne sera jamais trop déroutante, s’en verrait réellement embellie.” It will become clearer by the end of this essay that this line has been detourned, as the Situationists call it, taken from its original context, an essay in a journal, and put to a new use (epigraph for an essay). The original can be found in Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “Mode d’emploi du détournement,” Les Lèvres Nues 8 (May 1956). 2. The guidebook approach to Ulysses does not begin in earnest until 1950 with the publication of Patricia Hutchins’s, James Joyce’s Dublin (London: The Grey Walls Press). As with William York Tindall’s The Joyce Country a decade later, there is less of a topographical emphasis on Dublin. These early guides are more like coffee-table books for the stay-at-home reader complete with period photographs of Dublin. 3. The list is long, but even the most abbreviated one should include Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s Dublin (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1950); William York Tindall’s The Joyce Country (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1960); Cyril Pearl, Dublin in Bloomtime: The City James Joyce Knew (London: Angus and Robertson, 1969); Clive Hart and Leo Knuth, A Topographical Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, 2 vols. (Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press, 1975, 1981); Bruce Bidwell and Linda Heffer, The Joycean Way: A Topographic Guide to Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Dublin, Wolfhound Press, 1981); Frank Delaney, James Joyce’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses (London: Hodder and

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

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Stroughton, 1981); Robert Nicholson, The Ulysses Guide: Tours Through Joyce’s Dublin (London: Methuen, 1988). I talk about the history of literary cartography in Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 19–42. See A Dickens Atlas, Including Twelve Walks in London with Charles Dickens, ed. Albert A. Hopkins and Newbury Frost Read (London: The Hatton Garden Press & London: Spurr & Swift, 1923); Norah Stevenson, Paris dans la Comédie humaine (Paris: Librairie Georges Courville, 1938). Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–68; Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 115–151. “Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Space,” in Semi-Colonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51. See Eric Bulson, “Joyce’s Geodesy,” Journal of Modern Literature 25:2 (Winter 2000–2001), 80–96; Jon Hegglund, “Ulysses and the Rhetoric of Cartography,” Twentieth Century Literature 49:2 (Summer 2003), 164–192. Hegglund, “Ulysses and the Rhetoric,” 188. I am drawing here on Jonathan Crary’s argument about the historicity of perception, the ways that technology shapes how individuals process visual information. See Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 123–125. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258. And William Faulkner who would bring it to the rural South. Georg Lukacs, “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Merlin Press, 1970), 110–148. Lukacs, “Narrate or Describe?” 129. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 1. Budgen, James Joyce, 69–70. Hugh Kenner was one of the fi rst critics to draw attention to these unnarrated spatial and temporal moments in between episodes. In order for Stephen to get from Dalkey to Sandymount in the time allotted between “Nestor” and “Proteus,” Kenner suspects that he must have taken a tram. Questions of this sort abound: how does Bloom get from 7 Eccles Street to Sir John Rogerson’s Quay between “Calypso” and “Lotus-Eaters”? A similar gap exists between “Cyclops” and “Nausikaa.” Bloom visits the Dignam family to arrange for the insurance policy, but this entire event is blocked out of the novel. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, [rpt. 1978] 1986), 8. Debord, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 1. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent Situationist articles are taken from this volume. Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 5.

144 Eric Bulson 22. Debord, “Introduction,” 7. 23. See Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 24. Anonymous, “Eloge en prose detournée,” Potlatch no. 26 (Paris, May 1956). See also James Joyce, Œuvres II, ed. Jacques Aubert (Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 788. 25. In “Methods of Detournement,” Debord entertains the possibility that entire novels could be detourned by juxtaposing image and text without providing any explicit commentary on their connection. He’s particularly interested in George Sand’s Consuelo, a novel that could be “relaunched on the literary market disguised under some innocuous title like ‘Life in the Suburbs’ or even under a title itself detourned, such as ‘The Lost Patrol.’” See “Methods of Detournement,” 11–12. 26. Because I was unable to secure the rights for an electronic version of this image from the Nabokov estate, I will direct my readers to Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), which reproduces a few of them. Anyone interested in the originals can fi nd them in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. 27. The link can be found at: http://www.vagueterrain.net/journal13/conormcgarrigle/01. 28. See, for instance, Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, ed. Nato Thompson (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2009); Atlas of Radical Cartography, eds. Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008); Else/Where: Mapping—New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, ed. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006). A collection of some of the maps that accompany Experimental Geography can be found at: www.mapsarchive.org. 29. The project has expanded to other cities including Zagreb and Syracuse. 30. See http://chicagoatlas.areaprojects.com/.

8

The Habitus of Language(s) in Finnegans Wake Laurent Milesi

In Chapter I.5 of Finnegans Wake, devoted to interpretations of the “mamafesta” or small-scale replica of the book, Joyce famously includes a list of ‘sigla’ for the major protagonists, among which the text itself is assigned a square representing a container or a house, a habitacle or habitation (FW 119.29–30: “their old fourwheedler for the bucker’s field”; cf. also FW 299.F4, one of seven in the “Doodles family”). What the ancients called habitus originally tied together holding, having, hence the way in which one holds or has oneself, that is, the mode or condition in which one is, exists, or exhibits oneself a) externally—hence demeanor, outward appearance, fashion of body, mode of clothing oneself, dress, habitation (cf. FW 4.31: “habitacularly”; 115.09: “habits,” both as customs and dress; 160.09: “ha has a habitat of doing”); b) in mind, character, or life—hence, mental constitution, character, disposition, way of acting, comporting oneself, or dealing with things, habitual or customary way (of acting, etc.), personal custom, accustomedness.1 Those various etymological ingredients are often combined in depictions of HCE’s actions, his public speeches, (self-)vindications or accusations, and will provide the larger theoretical framework for this exploration of some of the ways in which Joyce’s last novel thematicizes geolinguistics (the mixture of historical linguistics, [fictionalized] language families, and their geographical, spatial deployment), especially through the movements and multiple origins of its characters, their ‘ethical’ deportments according to the Hegelian understanding of ethos as Sittlichkeit, or a set of customs characteristic of a place to which it lends its political, national, and other identities, recalled by Derrida in Of Hospitality as a basis of his own conception of cosmopolitics and absolute hospitality. Take, for example, the following passage, also from FW I.5, “. . . preferring to close his blinkhard’s eyes to the ethiquethical fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some defi nite articles of evolutionary clothing” (FW 109.20.24), where habit is conjoined with ethics but also evolution, or the need to adapt to one’s environment (“space”) in time, and “articles” possibly brings together grammar and clothing (cf. also FW 185.09–10: “cloaked up in the language of blushfed porporates”). Similarly, Saussure begins his section of the Course in General Linguistics

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devoted to “Geographical Linguistics” by observing that “primitive people look upon language as a habit or custom like dress or weapons,” and recalls that “Greek idioma had already acquired the meaning ‘special custom’.”2 This metafictional construction of the Wake as a habitus of language will in turn be correlated to the Heideggerian notion of the “house of language” or inhabiting language, whose existential nationalist politics will be implicitly set off against Joyce’s more Derridean notion of hospitality and—seemingly a paradox, if applied to Finnegans Wake, which I will try to explain—Derrida’s “monolanguage of the other” in Monolingualism of the Other: The Prosthesis of Origin.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF LANGUAGE(S) From the quaint blend of popular beliefs and scientificity that presided over the nineteenth-century philological tradition on which his linguistic curiosity and expertise was reared, Joyce derived the highly thematizable notions, for fictional purposes, of a language ‘character’ and ‘family.’ The various intricate weavings of sigla, alphabetical letters or characters, voices, and idioms contribute to shaping loose linguistic families in the work’s “cellellenteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript” (FW 219.17), conjunctions, and disjunctions that freely comply with or even bypass the stricter laws of historical kinship to fully exploit the range of thematic valencies offered by cultural, geographical, or historico-political coincidences. These atomic families often intersect with the family nucleus of Wakean protagonists—see FW 615.06–07: “the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One,” soon after “illyrical and innumantic in our mutter nation” (FW 615.04)—and provide a linguistic replica to the ever lurking presence of two or three boys/girls in the work’s polymorphous sin, whose quest thus doubles up as a linguistic quest. They also remind us of the Vichian equivalence between the history of families and institutions and the history of language(s), a narrative-structural topos that may be traced back to the alignment of idioms with the genealogies of peoples in the Bible and its exegetical traditions. Such a cross-linguistic, ‘comparative’ thematics only surfaces fully, if allusively, in the fi nal text, in the various colorings, moods, and tones an idiom may lend to a given passage or throughout the work, but are already revealed in a raw, more accessible form in the ‘research indexes’ of the preliminary notebooks. For instance, Italian, Romansch, and Provençal are punningly interrelated as romance languages of the young girl Issy or of a younger ALP;3 Italian and Irish offer contrasted versions of multiple identity and of political, psychoanalytical, linguistic split: irredent provinces and plurality of dialects (Italian), division of Ireland and P/K split in Irish, and are often found in the vicinity of the schizophrenic girl Issy.4 Scandinavian and Slavonic languages stage one version of the linguistic drama of origins in the two central tales of FW II.3.5 Conversely, Finnish,

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Scandinavian languages, Portuguese, and Swahili, all associated within the fluvial vein of the work, implictly show that the dimension of spatial contiguity in geolinguistics can also be reimagined for fictional purposes. Uralic languages (cf. FW 162.12: “Persic-Uraliens hostery”) are facetiously thematized as Ur-aliens on account of their ‘exotic’ agglutinative morphology.6 And Latin versus Greek, Russian (and other Slavonic languages) dramatize religious schism (especially in “The Mookse and the Gripes,” FW I.6). More than twenty years after its publication—and in a critical context that has often turned its back on specific analyses of Joyce’s thematic treatment of language and languages as if it were a boringly empirical thing of the past when it was more acceptable for critics to be moved by an ‘annotating drive’—John Bishop’s conclusive remark to a lengthy footnote in Joyce’s Book of the Dark about Dutch, Swahili, and Armenian, that “[a] great deal more work needs to be done . . . on the ‘states’ that the languages of foreign states evoke in the Wake” still bears critical relevance and can be made to acquire renewed resonance here.7 As a prelude to the “Buckley and the Russian General” episode of FW II.3, the ‘stage direction’ “Enterruption. Check or slowback. Dvershen” (FW 332.36) introduces the linguistic prologue in Czech major as a Czechoslovak/Czech or Slovak diversion, as well as Kate or “katekattershin” (FW 333.07; Czech Kateřina), dressed as a historical figure, who opens the door (“Dvershen,” or Czech dveře). Thus Czech and other Slavonic languages, but perhaps also Hungarian (szesz: alcohol; szusz: breath, wind), in the preamble on FW 333.01–05, herald, by linguistic and geographical proximity, the ensuing Crimean battle, described in dominant Russian accents, and provide a linguistic threshold (‘door’) to the historical scene, to be closed when Kate’s ‘dress rehearsal’ is over: “So the katey’s came and the katey’s game. As so gangs sludgenose. And that henchwench what hopped it dunneth there duft the. Duras” (FW 334.28–30). More generally Finnegans Wake is rife with open doors, or requests to open (but also shut) them, as in the episode of the Prankquean and Jarl van Hoother (FW 21.05–23.15), and their structural relevance is such that it is recalled in several motifs endowed with a pulsating, syncopated rhythm, as in the previous quotation, in one of the ten instances of the thunderword (FW 257.27–28: polyglottal variations on ‘lock the door’), or else in FW 20.13–18, ushering in the interlude of the Prankquean riddle, with its distant allusion to the number of postBabelian languages: “So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined . . . till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor.” Marking the spatial limit between the inside and outside of a house or home, between native and foreign\stranger, but also between homecoming and exile, the ‘liminality’ of doors—the limes also designated the frontier between the Roman Empire and the ‘barbarians’— features in rituals of hospitality, whose symbolic structure could be mapped on to the Wake’s self-awareness as a miscegenated geolinguistic habitus; as

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Derrida observes, “in order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world [l’étranger].”8 Thus Joyce’s Wakean idiom, down to its fusion portmanteau word, once held to be the acme of punning linguisticism, can be reappraised for its more profound ‘ethical’ geopolitics, according to the Greek, then Hegelian conception of ethos or Sittlichkeit recalled by Jacques Derrida in Of Hospitality in relation to the ‘ur-alien’ (étranger) and the laws of hospitality, and described as follows: [T]he circumscribed field of ethos or ethics, of habitat or time spent as ethos, of Sittlichkeit, of objective morality, especially in the three instances determined by law and Hegel’s philosophy of law: the family, bourgeois or civil society, and the State (or the nation-state) [to which one could add the city as polis here].9 With his versatile foreign origin as Ur-alien, Scandinavian, and Russian, before being assimilated (‘aryanized’) as a Dublin citizen—(FW 215.26–27: “Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis!”)—“Here Comes Everybody” is the ultimate alltoo-human prototype in this hybrid geolinguistics of ancient migrations and errancies, of linguistic and family genealogies set adrift on the riverrun of the Wake, of the age-old historical tale of the outlex become inlaw (cf. FW 169.03–04), or the conquering foreigner being integrated as a native. Whether from Babel to Pentecostal atonement (the gift of tongues) or to translation (from the father’s punishment to the sons’ rebellion), the Wake incessantly restages the drama of the evolution, corruption, multiplication, and redemption of language as a creative felix culpa whose dynamic unit is the miscegenated portmanteau word, which aptly reconciles in its spatial confi nes, as it were through a process of at-one-ment, estranged languages and the cultures they represent into a localized, transcultural synthesis, just as the whole encyclopaedic universe is subsumed into the microcosmic Dublin family of the Earwickers. The Wake’s microcosmic linguistic element can now also be seen as the atoned locus of xenolalia and linguistic hospitality, gathering in a denationalized Pentecostal space ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ components alike, erasing the threshold between them via a constant process of translation, of which Derrida’s essay on “Hostipitality” notes that it is “an enigmatic phenomenon or experience of hospitality, if not the condition of all hospitality in general.”10

THE HOS(TI)PITALITY AND ‘ETHICS’ OF LANGUAGE In Of Hospitality Derrida recalls an ancient (Greek) paradigm which bears in nuce some likeness to the Vichian cycles of generations and supersessions

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in the Wake, the displacement of a once foreign invader become father (of the nation, city, family) by an ‘estranged’ parricidal son replaying the necessity to translate the father’s law: [I]n many of Plato’s dialogues, it is often the Foreigner (xenos) who questions . . . It is the Foreigner who, by putting forward the unbearable question, the parricide question . . . shakes up the threatening dogmatism of the paternal logos: the being that is, and the non-being that is not. As though the Foreigner had to begin by contesting the authority of the chief, the father, the master of the family, the ‘master of the house,’ of the power of hospitality, of the hosti-pets ... [The Foreigner] would not dream of defending himself against it if he did not feel deep down . . . that to say ‘non-being is’ remains a challenge to Parmenides’ paternal logic, a challenge coming from the foreigner. Like any parricide, this one takes place in the family: a foreigner can be a parricide [and a parricide ‘can only be a son’; p. 9] only when he is in some sense within the family . . . It is also the place where the question of hospitality is articulated with the question of being. ... [The foreigner] has to ask for hospitality in a language which by defi nition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc. This personage imposes on him translation into their own language.11 Paterfamilias, king (cf. FW 32.36: “viceregal”; FW 33.30: “vicefreegal”), lord, HCE early misconstrues as a projected act of rebellious overthrow by a revolutionary (cf. his defensive, stammering reply: “Shsh shake, cocomeraid!,” FW 36.20) a request for time addressed by a young ‘cad’ punctuated by a dismissive bras d’honneur (FW 36.16–18)—the chapter will close on the ballad to HCE as Hosty or Persse O’Reilly, the “king of all ranns” (FW 44.16–17). At the end of the “Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies,” in the divine subcycle of the Heroic Age of the Wake (FW II.1), we then see him as the “Dad” or “Loud” thrice thundering the children at play to return to their “habitations” (FW 258.27, 29) and do their homework, in a distinctly post-Babelian sequence famously analyzed by Derrida around “he war” (FW 258.12) in “Two Words for Joyce.”12 This homecoming should be read ambiguously both as the reaffi rmation of the master of the house’s paternal law but also as the hospitable welcoming back of the prodigal son(s) in exile—Shem-Glugg’s itinerant errancies in between his three guesses of the color of heliotrope in “The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies”—or parricidal element within: at the close of the following “Lessons” chapter (FW, 308) the twins and their sister will write a joint poisonous “nightletter” of “youlldied greedings” dispatching their

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sires. The exiled son comes home as the foreign insider in order to dislodge the paternal law: “Only is order othered” (FW 613.13–14), which, if said in a thick Irish brogue, easily turns order into its contrary other in compliance with Giordano Bruno’s coincidentia oppositorum or the laws of hostipitality (hospitality and hostility) within the attritional portmanteau word and the pliable Wakean sentence. If, according to Levinas, “language is hospitality,”13 then the Wake’s linguistic-familial nucleus welcomes the other within according to the combinatory laws of hybridity and miscegenation which turn the work’s geolinguistics into a spatial ‘ethics’: “[T]he problem of hospitality [is] coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home.”14 Later described in his prototypical role of “poor old hospitable corn and eggfactor, King Roderick O’Conor, the paramount chief polemarch and last preelectric king of Ireland” (FW 380.11–13), “that highest personage” (FW 534.23) eventually enjoys his crowning moment of mixed glory as a (self-)vindicating, yet still guilt-stuttering noble citizen in the “Amtsadam, sir” speech (FW 532.06 ff.), which at times sounds like an inverted modern parody of The Apology of Socrates insofar as, rather than claiming the strategic role of a foreigner “required to justify himself, in the language of the other, before the law and the judges of the city,”15 HCE is still busy asserting his ‘eco-nomic’ (from oikonomos: the law of the home) reputation on “Babbyl Malket” (FW 532.25: Babel + babble; mall + market) and clearing his status of ostracized stranger accused by a mud-spluttering “caca cad” (FW 534.26).

THE HOUSE OF MONOLANGUAGE(S) “[W]e are no longer at home.”16 Derrida’s citational derision of this popular saying, whose ‘wisdom’ rings loud when “the very integrity of the self, of ipseity” feels threatened by the outsider from the inside, who contests the power of the master at home (ipse, potis, potens), must be heard in tandem with the famous opening propositions running parallel in the fi rst two chapters of “Monolingualism of the Other”: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine.’ ... I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells [demeure], and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. 1. We only ever speak one language [On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue]. 2. We never speak only one language [On ne parle jamais une seule langue].17

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A “double postulation” which is soon proclaimed to be “not only the very law of what is called translation” but “the law itself as translation,”18 thus chiming in unison with the singular-plural nature of Wakese bearing within itself the principles of its own quasi-parricidal (familial, linguistic) intralinear translations.19 This dissociative “monolanguage of the other”—“My language, the only one I hear myself speak and agree to speak, is the language of the other”—is conceived at once as a house we inhabit and that inhabits us, an aliénation à demeure wherein the host also ‘translates’ into a hostage and which “dictates even the ipseity of all things . . . [a]bidingly [A demeure].”20 Conversely “the other languages which, more or less clumsily, I read, decode, or sometimes speak, are languages I shall never inhabit. Where ‘inhabiting’ begins to mean something to me. And dwelling [demeurer].”21 Within a discussion of identity and ipseity in relation to issues of mono- or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and belonging, Derrida will soon recall Benveniste’s semantico-etymological chain which unites hospitality and hostility, hospes and hostis, in order to point the way toward a more generalizable, absolute hos(ti)pitality. 22 In Finnegans Wake the ubiquitous, ambiguous “Hosty” is often coextensive with his house, as in “Eagle Cock Hostel” (FW 53.28), that is, a hostel or house run by a host (cf. the etymology of hospodar and suchlike recalled by Derrida in “Hostipitality,” 13–14), but a host always his own enemy (hostis) and ready to turn into a hostage—see FW 166.18: “held hostage at armslength,” in a context fraught with the two/three boys/girls, and 518.16: “Hostages and Co, Engineers”—or even a ghost (passim but esp. FW 501.31–33: “He was hosting himself up and flosting himself around and ghosting himself to merry her murmur like an andeanupper balkan”) (g)hosting a spectrally returning (“riverrun”) text. 23 We saw previously how hospitality presupposes a request in the master of the house’s language of the other as opposed to the stranger’s mother tongue. In Of Hospitality, Derrida muses on the issue of what language, “the so-called mother tongue,” names and breaks down the barrier between mother and other: What is called the ‘mother’ tongue is already ‘the other’s language.’ . . . Doesn’t it figure the home that never leaves us? The proper or property, at least the fantasy of property that, as close as could be to our bodies . . . would give place to the most inalienable place, to a sort of mobile habitat, a garment or a tent? Wouldn’t this mother tongue be a sort of second skin you wear on yourself, a mobile home? But also an immobile home since it moves about with us?24 The irreducible “exappropriation” at work within the monolanguage of the other compromises the innermost self, what one has like a home or a house, even a garment or second skin, that gives us the illusion of power

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and property. The sinful stripping of the all-too-human foreign hero as he undergoes a process of ‘nativization’ mimes this porose contamination between what would be a residual, bare-bones English substratum of “Homely Anglian Monosyllables” (FW 306.26) and adjunctive strata of alien idioms in a double movement of de/recolonization already adumbrated in Joyce’s stress on the hybridity and miscegenation of races in his 1907 lecture “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages.”25 If Joyce’s narrative often evinces an impulse toward the radical (FW 424.17: “root language” and the famous “abnihilisation of the etym,” FW 353.22), its aim is not to consolidate an existing national idiom in a ‘gathering’ gesture à la Heidegger but rather to allow all languages, ‘major’ or ‘minor,’ ‘natural’ or ‘artificial,’ to interact and coexist within the versatile entity of the Wakean coinage, in a reversible process of nativization (acclimatization) and foreignization (defamiliarization) or dis-habituation (alienation, estrangement) as much as dis-inhabitation. But is a foreigner or stranger a radical other to begin with? In “Hostipitality” Derrida comments: Hospitality is owed to the other as stranger. But if one determines the other as stranger, one is already introducing the circles of conditionality that are family, nation, state, and citizenship. Perhaps there is an other who is still more foreign than the one whose foreignness cannot be restricted to foreignness in relation to language, family, or citizenship. Thus we would need to attempt a difficult distinction—subtle but necessary—between the other and the stranger; and we would need to venture into what is both the implication and the consequence of this double bind, this impossibility as condition of possibility, namely, the troubling analogy in their common origin between hostis as host and hostis as enemy, between hospitality and hostility.26 But as he notes in Of Hospitality, [T]he difference . . . between the foreigner and the absolute other is that the latter cannot have a name or family name; the absolute or unconditional hospitality I would like to offer him or her presupposes a break with hospitality in the ordinary sense, with conditional hospitality, with the right to or pact of hospitality.27 Though at face value that absolute other would not seem to have a place in the plurilingual postcoloniality of Finnegans Wake, it is worth relating it to its ultimate ‘origin’ for Derrida, in the monolanguage of the other which challenges the sovereignty of the subject, to understand how the cosmopolitics of Joyce’s hostipitable portmanteau idiom ties in with the radically self-alienated nature of the Wakean subject and family beyond critically acclaimed hybridity.

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If for Derrida “the being-oneself in one’s own home” is “the condition of the gift and of hospitality,”28 and if, as Heidegger famously said in the “Letter on Humanism,” “Language is the house of Being,”29 then Finnegans Wake celebrates in its very building and building blocks this ekstatic housing of language(s) as universal man (HCE)’s truly ‘ethical’ condition ceaselessly navigating between homecoming—as in the more thinly foreignized passages of Joyce’s text—and homelessness—its more densely polyglottal sequences.30 Thus, for Joyce after Heidegger (and Heraclitus) and Derrida, thinking space or spatiality, including that of language(s), is intrinsically ethical. The Wake’s fictionalization of linguistic families and reimagining of migrations and geopolitics should therefore be rethought as the anchoring point between aesthetics and a redefi ned ‘ethics,’ forcing us to cast off our old habits of critical evaluations. NOTES 1. See OED, s. v. ‘habit.’ 2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1959), 191. 3. In particular for Italian, see Laurent Milesi, “Italian Studies in Musical Grammar,” in James Joyce 3: «“Scribble” 3: Joyce et l’Italie» (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1994), 105–153. 4. See Laurent Milesi, “The Perversions of ‘Aerse’ and the Anglo-Irish Middle Voice in Finnegans Wake,” in Joyce Studies Annual 1993, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 98–118. 5. See my “The Dramatisation and Revolution of Slav(e)s in Finnegans Wake,” Irish Slavonic Studies 15 (1994), 45–64. 6. See Laurent Milesi, “L’idiome babélien de Finnegans Wake: Recherches thématiques dans une perspective génétique,” in Genèse de Babel: Joyce et la création, ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris: CNRS, 1985), 155–215. 7. John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 460–461, n. 29. 8. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 61. 9. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 45; cf. also 23. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock, Angelaki 5:3 (December 2000), 6. 11. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 5, 7–9, 15. Cf. also the fi rst syllogism in his H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . , trans., with additional notes, by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 6: “Quasi-parricide is the condition of translation.” 12. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington, PostStructuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 148–158. 13. Recalled by Derrida in Of Hospitality, 135. 14. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 149, 151. 15. Cf. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 15. 16. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 53. 17. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1, 7. I have also supplied the original French formulas for greater clarity.

154 Laurent Milesi 18. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 10. 19. One should here refer to James S. Atherton’s identifi cation of a “trope of translation” at work in the syntactical deployment of Wakean polyglottism, as in, for example, “drim and drumming on her back” (FW 223.10), where the Irish druim/drom is translated into English ‘back’ while a shift in signifiers (‘drumming’) turns (tropes) or ‘metaphorizes’ the fi rst element into the fi rst link of a second semantic chain. Plurilingual stratification is thus obtained by variations on the paradigmatic axis (the vertical dimension of the portmanteau word as a concretion of signifiers and signifieds) as well as syntagmatically (the horizontal dimension of various linear readings), breaking down the barrier between intralingual and interlingual translation through a constant switch between the phonic and the graphic poles of language in a ‘spatialized’ idiom. See James S. Atherton, The Books at the ‘Wake’: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Mamaroneck, NY: Paul Appel, 1974 ed.), 203. 20. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 25 (which also refers to the original publication of Demeure for clarification about his insistent use of the French idiom à demeure), 1–2 (translation modified). 21. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 56. 22. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 14; cf. also the several texts relating to hospitality referenced supra. 23. For the host as ghost, see another session of Jacques Derrida’s seminar on hospitality, also published as “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion, ed. and intr. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 359. 24. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 89. 25. James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 108–126. 26. Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 8, 15. Cf. also Of Hospitality, 41, 43. 27. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 25. 28. Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 4. 29. “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells”; “language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it.” Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), rev. expanded ed. and intr. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978), 217, 237. 30. Cf. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 256ff. for ethos as, essentially, abode, dwelling place—what Derrida further problematized as the (mise à) demeure of the monolanguage in which the other lasts abidingly.

9

Joyce the Post David Spurr

Among the materials to be found in the archives of the James Joyce Centre in Zurich is a postcard sent from Joyce to his Zurich friends Carola and Siegfried Giedion. It is dated August 15, 1937, and is sent from the Hotel zur Krone in Rheinfelden, the Swiss town on the Rhine where Joyce is staying on holiday with his family. It is one of more than two dozen such cards Joyce sent to the Giedions between 1933 and 1938, and this one is fairly typical. Like the others, it shows an architectural monument, perhaps in acknowledgment of Siegfried Giedion’s standing as one of the foremost architectural historians of his time. The picture shows a view of the town through the pointed arch in the stone tower (the “Oberturm”) that marks the medieval entrance to the city, still one of the icons of Rheinfelden. Orthographically, the inscription on the card corresponds to the nonchalance of the genre: in naming his place of lodging Joyce misuses the dative case in German (“Hotel zur Kronen”) and misspells the surname of his friends as “Gideon,” using the biblical form of the name. The message reads, “Greetings to you both from here where we are to you there if you are there or wherever you are. James Joyce.”1 This bit of wit applied to the banality of the occasion seems to confirm an insight of Joyce’s implicit everywhere in his writing: that the instrumental technology of the postal system serves to organize the space of human communication according to the identification of subjects as senders and receivers, and as the poles and relay points of the various message systems that constitute the post. In the postcard from Rheinfelden, Joyce strips the message down to its fundamental functions as if to call attention to them: the deictic, which designates the respective positions of sender and addressee as “here” and “there,” and the phatic, which confi rms the contact between sender and receiver, and assures that the channel of communication is open and functioning. The postcard is the purest and, in Joyce’s day, the most modern element of the postal system, in its reducibility to the essential functions of the system emptied of content: hence its reliance on cliché and its relative anonymity, its ephemerality, and lack of intrinsic value. Joyce has a penchant for postcards: he sends them regularly to family and friends, like any tourist. But in his works of fiction they seem designed to show that even the

156 David Spurr most neutral and banal form of postal communication is not innocent insofar as Joyce’s characters, and Joyce himself, are interpellated or solicited by what Jacques Derrida calls the “postal principle”: they are both subjected to and constituted as subjects by post cards, letters, and other transmitted and circulated texts. 2 In the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus muses ironically on the destinations he intended for his youthful “epiphanies”: “copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria” (U 3.141–142). But there is evidence that Joyce as well thought of his works as dispatches sent from the various cities in which they were written. The fi nal words of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man give the place-names and dates of the composition of the work: “Dublin 1904,” “Trieste 1914.” Ulysses ends with the compound “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914–1921,” and, contrary to popular belief, Finnegans Wake does in fact have a full stop at the end of the last page, with “Paris, 1922–1939.” The formula resembles the postmark, giving both a date and the place from which the dispatch is sent. These inscriptions mark the stations of an itinerary; they are not so much return addresses as a series of addresses from each of which a work is sent off as an envoi. They allow us to map Joyce’s movements through space and time, to locate and identify him as expéditeur and ourselves as destinataires, and therefore to situate his work within the spatial logic of the tekhnè of the post. Joyce’s “postmarks” locate the composition of his works in several European cities of the twentieth century, thus accounting for their form and content in terms of a given historical setting and moment. Their destination is in fact all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria, 3 and therefore posterity, which is to say that their destination constitutes their destiny: “le destinal se poste” (Derrida 72). Joyce is what I shall call a postal writer in that, on the one hand, his work intervenes in the global network of the transmission of texts, while on the other, it reproduces on its own terms the spatial mastery that connects a provincial capital to every other part of the world. We shall see, however, that in Joyce the function of the post as a means of delivering the written word from sender to addressee is ultimately indissociable from the problematic of desire as it mediates between the subject and its other. The history of philosophical reflections on the postal system dates at least from its emergence in modern form. Voltaire conceives of the postal system as a triumph of the age of enlightenment, whereby if one of your friends needs to draw money in St. Petersburg and the other at Smyrna, the post office takes care of the matter. Or, if you are stationed with your regiment near Prague and your mistress has stayed in Bordeaux, she will inform you of all the goings-on at home except her own infidelities. The post is “le lien de toutes les affaires, de toutes les négociations; les absents deviennent par elle présents; elle est la consolation de la vie [the connection between all affairs, all negotiations; through it those absent become present; it is the consolation of life].”4 This sentiment is echoed in Jane

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Austen’s Emma (1816), where even the risk of catching cold in the rain will not deter Jane Fairfax from walking to the post office in search of news from those dear to her: “The post-office is a wonderful establishment!” said she . . . ”So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is even carried wrong—and not one in a million, I suppose, actually lost! And when one considers the variety of hands, and of bad hands too, that are to be deciphered, it increases the wonder!”5 Twelve chapters later, the reader learns the reason for Miss Fairfax’s solicitude in fetching her own letters: they come from Frank Churchill in Yorkshire, to whom she is secretly engaged. Nonetheless, her speech reflects a view, characteristic of the age, of the post office as a great regulator and omniscient decipherer, able to transform the scrawl of every bad hand into the uniform legibility of a precise destination, and to deliver it with unfailing regularity and dispatch. Miss Fairfax’s wonder reflects Austen’s more general faith in the institutions of England, such as the Established Church and the Navy—if not always in the persons who occupy positions of authority in those institutions. The modern postal system dates from the General Postal Union established by the Treaty of Bern in 1874, and providing for the free exchange of international mail, initially among twenty-two countries, so that, for example, a letter sent from Dublin to Trieste could be forwarded from Paris without extra fees being added on the way. Before the formation of the postal union, mail was carried by private fi rms such as the one owned by the Italian-Austrian family of Thurn und Taxis, which in the eighteenth century employed more than 20,000 persons and several thousand horses to assure mail service over a territory ranging from Brussels to Innsbrück. Joyce pays homage to this family when, at the end of the “Haveth Childers Everywhere” section of Finnegans Wake (FW 532–554), he evokes the building of the city of Dublin and, by extension, of cities throughout the world endowed with modern forms of transport such as “poster shays and turnintaxis” (FW 554.1). The postal service thus ensures the mastery of urban as well as international space. In the twentieth century, the possession of a postal address became not only a means of receiving mail, but also, for any individual, the single most important condition for civil recognition of any kind. In contemporary society, as every homeless person knows, to be without a postal address is, for all practical purposes, not to exist. What is true for homeless persons is equally true for certain countries, such as Turkish Cyprus, Palestine, or the Western Sahara, to which the Universal Postal Union (so named since 1878) does not make direct international deliveries. Even in the age of Internet, the postal union remains an extremely powerful institution in its organization of geographical space at every level from international boundaries to separate rooms on

158 David Spurr the same floor of a single building. This universal organization of space is accomplished in part by the increasingly rigid syntax of the postal address, according to which, in theory and almost literally in practice, every person on earth can be identified according to name, domicile, place of residence, postal code, and country. Given that the written document is the primary mode of communication for an institution at once so far-reaching geographically and so deeply penetrating socially, it is not surprising that the major European philosopher of the latter half of the twentieth century has reflected on the nature of the relation between, on the one hand, letters and their destinations and, on the other, the destiny of letters in the literary sense. So it is that what was a source of consolation for a philosopher of the eighteenth century can be for a philosopher of the twentieth the figure of division, difference, absence, and metaphysical homelessness. Jacques Derrida’s meditation on the transmission of knowledge from Plato to the present-day sees the entire history of writing as a massive, oppressive accumulation of letters sent to no known destination: Dès lors que, à la seconde, le premier trait d’une lettre se divise et doit bien supporter la partition pour s’identifier, il n’y plus que des cartes postales, des morceaux anonymes et sans domicile fi xe, sans destinataire attitré, lettres ouvertes, mais comme des cryptes. Toute notre bibliothèque, toute notre encyclopédie, nos mots, nos images, nos figures, nos secrets, un immense château de cartes postales. [At the very second when the fi rst stroke of a letter divides and must suffer this partition in order to be identified, there is no longer anything but postcards—anonymous, homeless pieces without proper addressees, open letters, but open like crypts. Our entire library, our entire encyclopaedia, our words, our images, our figures, our secrets—an immense house of postcards]. (Derrida 60) According to this view, the fate of the subject is analogous to what happens to the letter: in order to acquire an identity it must suffer division and be assigned a destiny. The postal system is therefore the technological figure of the machinery that determines the disposition, distribution, and positionality of the modern subject: “Toute l’histoire de la tekhnè postale tend à river la destination à l’identité [The entire history of the postal tekhnè tends to rivet destination to identity] (Derrida 207).”6 In this sense the postal system functions as a rationalized and technologized form of the symbolic order. But to the extent that the post is a technology, it extends beyond the merely instrumental function performed by the global machinery of the organization, transportation, and distribution of the mail. In its effects on the subject, the post, in contrast to more ancient forms of tekhnè, may be characterized in terms of what Heidegger calls Herausfordern, the summoning or challenging forth “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply

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energy that can be extracted and stored as such,” rather than relying on the energy that nature supplies spontaneously, such as the wind that drives the windmill; modern technology is thus a setting-in-order which sets upon (stellt) nature.7 The postal system conforms to this account of modern technology in its summoning forth of subjects to serve as senders and receivers, and to remain perpetually as it were on call, that is, to occupy positions of permanent availability to the demands of the network as a whole. Like other technologies, the post functions as an extension of the human that increases the power of the subject while diminishing its value. As a writer, Joyce is concerned with the consequences of this predicament for his own language, and for language in general. He seems to foresee the situation diagnosed by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in a recent interview: D’une part il y a les êtres vivants, les hommes, d’autre part les dispositifs, celui des téléphones portables, par exemple. Les hommes ont toujours eu affaire a des dispositifs, mais cette dimension s’est accrue au point que tout est organisé par des dispositifs. [On the one hand there are living human beings, on the other hand mechanisms of organisation, portable telephones, for example. Human beings have always had to do with mechanisms of organisation, but this dimension has increased to the point where everything is organised by these mechanisms].8 The two most prominent evocations of the postal system in Joyce’s work occur, respectively, in the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses and in Chapter III.1 of Finnegans Wake, where Shaun appears in full postman’s regalia. In “Aeolus,” the paragraph on the general post office is placed between the opening paragraph on the Dublin tram system and the following section set in the quarters of the Freeman’s Journal and Evening Telegraph. The chapter opens, then, with a survey of the three powers located “[i]n the heart of the Hibernian metropolis” (U 7.1) which together ensure institutional mastery of the space of the city: the respective systems of transportation, communication, and information. It is the General Post Office, however, that is distinguished as “The Wearer of the Crown” (U 7.14), the institution that reaches out from the center of Dublin to the far corners of the British Empire and beyond.9 It is not by accident that, twelve years after the events related in Ulysses and two years before the writing of this chapter, the General Post Office became the site from which the rebels of Easter 1916 attempted to liberate Ireland from the Empire. In “Aeolus,” however, we do not penetrate inside the royal institution; like the shoeblacks working under the porch, we have access only to the temple precincts. Even here, however, there is enough to indicate the universal extension of the postal system: Parked in North Prince’s street His Majesty’s vermilion mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E.R., received loudly flung sacks

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Such an impressive display lacks only the personification of the post. This personification is supplied in almost mythic form by the figure, in Finnegans Wake, of Shaun resplendent in his postman’s uniform: a classy but rugged indigo overcoat with fur collar and lace swinging from the shoulder, a jacket with soft rolling lapels and great sealingwax buttons, a surpliced front with the embroidered motto “Or for royal, Am for Mail, R.M.D” (FW 404.30). Thus arrayed, Shaun receives an Irish blessing from an admiring multitude: “[M]ay his hundred thousand welcome stewed letters, relayed wand postchased, multiply, ay faith, and plutiply!” (FW 404.36–405.1). Shaun the Post is an immense figure, recruiting his strength with “meals of spadefuls of mounded food” (FW 405.30), and speaking in “general address” (FW 407.28) with a voice “pure as a churchmode” (FW 409.11–12) heard over the sea from Brittany to Nova Scotia, modestly declaring himself “a mere mailman of peace” (FW 408.10) while acknowledging his eminence as “the bearer extraordinary of these postoomany missive on his majesty’s service” (FW 408.13–14). The power and omnipresence of the post evoked in such passages have ambiguous and paradoxical effects in Joyce’s work. On the one hand, the persons of Joyce’s fictions are subjected to this power even as they seek to use it to their own ends. In a caricature of such a position, Garrett Deasy appears in the “Circe” episode as a racing jockey, urged on by the Orange Lodges, and riding a racehorse called Cock of the North. His face is plastered with postage stamps, and he shouts triumphantly, Per vias rectas! (U 15.3989). However hallucinatory it may be, this scene is nonetheless susceptible to an allegorical reading: Deasy the Orangeman is not just a messenger of empire but he is the letter itself, plastered over with postage stamps. He is what the empire has sent to Ireland by the straight and swift ways of the postal system, here understood metonymically as the entire system of imperial domination. Deasy is both product and reproducer of the postal principle; it is he who in the “Nestor” episode presses Stephen Dedalus into service to deliver his letter on the hoof and mouth disease to the editor of the Evening Telegraph, an errand which Stephen carries out dutifully if without enthusiasm. As figures of the post in its spatial mastery, the examples of Deasy and Shaun are sufficient in themselves to show that Joyce’s representation of space is never merely deictic, in the sense of locating objects and persons on a Cartesian grid. Joyce’s space is not just there; it is rather something produced, ultimately, by the forces of power and desire. Shaun’s glory as Überbriefträger derives not just from his status as the object of desire—“the Bel of Beaus’ Walk, a prime card if ever was!” (FW 405.13–14)—but also as the main relay or point-man in a postal system that reproduces the effects of desire in its overflowing multiplication of missives. The study of how

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space is made in Joyce thus needs to take into account, as Shari Benstock suggests, both “the space between desire and its object” and “the path of this desire” (169–170). Lacan makes the point even more radically when he states in one of his essays on Joyce that “Il n’y a aucun espace réel. C’est une construction purement verbale qu’on a épelée en trois dimensions, selon les lois, qu’on appelle ça, de la géométrie [There is no real space. It’s a purely verbal construction spelled out in three dimensions according to the laws of what is called geometry].” In any case for Lacan the orders of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real are entangled (embrouillés) to the point that each one overlaps into the other.10 Joyce reminds us of this entanglement in his use of the post as a figure not just for the institutional mastery of geographical and political space, but also as a metaphor for the envoi of desire from the subject to the other. A remarkable use of the metaphor in this sense occurs in the “Circe” episode, where, in the full throes of masochistic desire, Leopold Bloom resorts to a postal metaphor to express his abject submission to the massive whoremistress, Bella Cohen: (cowed) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. (U 15.2777–2780) This little speech resonates in so many and in such complex ways with our theme that one can do little more than enumerate them. First, Bloom shows himself to be the antithesis of Shaun: where Shaun masters space in his role as both object and subject of desire, Bloom confesses his exclusion from the system and thus his inability to “send” his desire, essentially his castration. This confession can be made only in the secret space of the brothel. The brothel’s removal from the space of daily life, the fact that its clients are incommunicado there and beyond the reach of the post, makes it the clandestine space of the imaginary of desire. Second, for contemporary readers acquainted with psychoanalysis, the language of Bloom’s speech, in its juxtaposition of desire, power, and the letter, recalls Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” in his seminar of 1955. Let us recall that in Poe’s story the possession of the letter, because its contents can create a scandal, confers power on whoever possesses it, and for this reason it is fi rst stolen and then retaken in a desperate round of circulation. For Lacan, Poe’s letter represents the symbolic order in relation to which the human subject is constituted. As the letter passes, by successive thefts, from hand to hand, it undergoes a symbolic transformation corresponding to the new configuration of power and desire brought about by its transfer. At each of these stages the respective functions of the persons in the story are defi ned solely by their position with respect to the letter. However, if the letter stands for the inevitable displacement of subjective identity according to its position in the chain of intersubjectivity,

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it also stands for the unconscious, because its shifting position determines for each character his desire: “C’est son inconscient avec toutes ses conséquences, c’est-à-dire qu’à chaque moment du circuit symbolique, chacun devient un autre homme [It is his unconscious with all its consequences, that is to say, at each successive moment of the symbolic circuit, each person becomes another].”11 In Bloom’s speech everything is there to invite a similar interpretation: transformation, desire, domination, the letter. However, where Lacan sees the purloined letter as a metaphorical illustration of the unconscious in its relation to the symbolic order, Joyce in this instance as in others suggests a metonymic and therefore more complex account of what connects desire, the letter, and the post. On the one hand, the letter is the envoy of desire to the other: “Envoy: Love me, love my umbrella” (GJ 16). It represents the formulation of desire in a manner adapted to the ways of the post, and subordinated to the syntax of address and destination. On the other hand, this very transfer represents a translation of desire made possible only by the otherness of the addressee, so that the envoy of desire serves, paradoxically, to distance the object of desire from its sender. What I am calling the letter here stands for that aspect of desire that goes to the encounter of the other, but only as other. It is in this sense that a letter is never truly readable, never really reaches its destination, and functions rather as a commemoration than a communication of desire. Bloom’s speech seems to acknowledge this predicament in confessing a constitutional inability to post or mobilize his desire, while actively expressing his desire for Bella’s domination, as if desire could be satisfied only through his own oblivion, only by annihilating the identity that subjects him to the symbolic order, here metonymically figured as the post. A fi nal point to be made about Bloom’s speech is that its mise en scène requires us to relate the problematic of desire and the letter to the specific phenomenon of masochism. Gilles Deleuze is of assistance here in his contribution to the theory of masochism, which he regards as being of a completely different order from sadism. For him, masochism is not symmetrical to sadism, does not derive pleasure from pain, and does not cultivate violence or cruelty for the sake of these things alone. The masochist does not seek to suffer, but has to suffer in the process of driving away pleasure, which threatens to interrupt the “field of immanence” that he seeks: Dès lors, le plaisir qui est un mode d’interruption . . . du plaisir, le masochiste ne cesse pas de le repousser. Au profit de quoi ? Au profit, à la lettre, d’un véritable “champ d’immanence”, champ d’immanence du désir, où le désir doit ne pas cesser de se reproduire lui-même. [From then on, the pleasure that takes the form of the interruption of pleasure is that which the masochist ceaselessly drives away. To what advantage? For the sake, literally, of a true “field of immanence,”

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a field of the immanence of desire where desire would not cease to reproduce itself.] 12 Suspense, delay, and deferral are the modes of the masochist. Here we have a possible means of connecting Bloom’s “unposted letter” to his desire for domination: it is not that one is to be remedied by the other, but rather that they represent the same thing: the turning away from pleasure in search of an immanent desire as constituting in some sense the condition of being. In his book on that other Leopold, Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze stresses the importance of classified advertisements and of anonymous or pseudonymous letters in initiating masochistic relations; such relations are contractual, dialectical, and imaginative in nature, whereas those of sadism are based on the model of the institutional figure who rules by compulsion and repetition.13 Already, then, in Sacher-Masoch, the post is the institution that makes possible a set of imagined relations that are themselves free of institutionality. Deleuze’s account of masochism is not unrelated to Lacan’s observation that “le désir est la métonymie du manque à être [desire is the metonym of the lack of being],”14 and that “dès que le sujet lui-même vient à l’être, il le doit à un certain non-être sur lequel il élève son être [at the moment when the subject himself comes into being, he owes it to a certain nonbeing on which he raises his being].”15 Deleuze’s version of this is that the masochist’s desexualization through dominance prepares for a resexualization of the self newly liberated from the demands of the superego.16 Bloom’s complete abjection before the imposing presence of the “exuberant female” returns him in effect to the state of nonbeing which is both the condition of being and of the mobilisation of desire. Simply put, Bloom wants not so much to satisfy as to realize his desire; he wants to live, but, “abandoned” by life itself, he must begin again by means of a return to the original state of submission to the life-giving exuberant female. The manner in which this predicament is rendered in the figurative language of the post is symptomatic of the complex relation in Joyce’s work between the construction of the subject and its implication in the system according to which subjects are defi ned according to identities, addresses, and destinations: “the general postoffice of human life.” If the postal system serves as a kind of concrete figuration of the symbolic order in time and space, then it, like the symbolic order itself, is the object of subversion and subterfuge by the forces of desire that it otherwise seeks to channel through the network of its own connections. Joyce’s work is thus full of the perverse effects of the postal system, as those who, marginalized within the symbolic order, seek the mobilization of their own desires through “working the system” or undermining it. Included in such abuses or misappropriations of the system are Bloom’s clandestine correspondence under an assumed name with “Martha Clifford,” the obscene letters sent to several highly respectable Dublin ladies, the anonymous and possibly insulting postcard sent to Denis Breen, the postcard of dubious

164 David Spurr taste and provenance displayed by the sailor D. B. Murphy, and, in a different register, the cryptic and proteiform letter minutely if somewhat deliriously examined in the fifth chapter of Finnegans Wake. The fi rst reference to the “too late box”17 occurs early in the “Lotus Eaters” episode of Ulysses, as Bloom surreptitiously enters the Westland Row post office: “Too late box. Post here. No-one. In” (U 5.53). Although this time Bloom is not too late to enter the post office, his errand there bespeaks a more fundamental condition of belatedness with respect to his deepest desires. Among other things, it is too late for Bloom to have a son to replace the one lost eleven years ago. A sign of this belatedness is the letter addressed impudently to “Mrs Marion Bloom” in the “bold hand” of Blazes Boylan (U 4.244), a letter of which Bloom himself makes unwilling delivery, only to see it disappear behind Molly’s pillow, an epistolary prelude to whatever pillow talk may take place there later in the day (U 4.251–257). The morning’s post has also brought Bloom a letter from his daughter. “A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you” (U 4.251). The shift in preposition (for me vs. to you) and the difference in modes of correspondence (the letter vs. the card) privilege the father– daughter relationship over the daughter’s relation to the mother. But the letter itself, which Bloom reads in the privacy of the kitchen, disquiets him with its hurried script, its breezy news of the young student Bannon and its instruction to greet Boylan on Milly’s behalf. Bloom’s relationship with his daughter has been marked by the postal principle ever since she was four years old, when her father put pieces of brown paper in the letterbox for her (U 4.285–286). Now, the signs of awakening sexuality in her letter mark the fatal term of that relation—“Destiny. Ripening now” (U 4.430)—a destiny to be reached through the designation of the father as destinataire: her sexual independence, bodily figured here in the form of the “torn envelope” (U 4.439), can be won only by declaring it to her father, a declaration most readily made by means of the indirection and distance rendered possible by the letter. It is too late for him to prevent it. The morning’s post has therefore brought Bloom a double blow of emasculation, as husband and as father, with its consequent feelings of paralysis: “Useless: can’t move . . . Useless to move now” (U 4.448–450). Viewed in this light, Bloom’s secret correspondence with Martha Clifford appears as a rather pathetic and belated attempt to turn the post to his own advantage in a displacement of his desire for Molly, he himself having been displaced as Molly’s lover. The mechanism is elaborate: Bloom writes under an assumed name with a correspondent whose status as a subject is purely postal, in the sense that she exists for him, like he for her, only as a name in a postal relation, the name “Martha Clifford” being possibly quite as fictitious as “Henry Flower,” and even as an alias not necessarily corresponding to the author of the letters sent over that signature: “Wonder did she wrote it herself” (U 5.268–269).18 Whereas Molly receives her letter from Boylan in bed, where she can read it at her leisure once her husband is

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gone, Bloom, in order to receive his letter from Martha, enters the Westland Row post office surreptitiously, collects it under an assumed name, retreats to an isolated location in order to read it, then tears the incriminating envelope in shreds, which he scatters on the road. The nature of the correspondence anticipates the sadomasochistic scene with Bella Cohen: on Martha’s side, the demand for ever more complete confession backed by a coy threat of punishment: “Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you” (U 5.251–252). On Bloom’s side, the expression of gradually increased doses of profanation: “Go further next time . . . Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time” (U 5.272–274). Bloom carries out this resolution later in the day at the Ormond Hotel. As Boylan is leaving the hotel bar for his assignation with Molly, Bloom, in the hotel dining room, writes his response to Martha: “[I]t will excite me. You know how . . . How will you pun? You punish me?” (U 11.888–891). The fact that such letters are exchanged without any possibility of Martha and “Henry” ever meeting—“Could meet one Sunday after the Rosary. Thank you: not having any” (U 5.270–271)—make them perfect illustrations of the love letter as the mise en œuvre of the writer’s sexual fantasy while sparing the expense of any actual communication of love. Colette Soler, following Lacan, explains the paradox of the love letter in general as follows: the love letter seems to speak of the Other, is in fact addressed to him (her), but being made out of the unconscious of the writing subject, it is more properly understood as the product of his own jouissance. “You see the paradox: the love letters are in fact a wall between subject and partner. So, we can conclude that the lover who writes too many love letters is just a lover of himself as unconscious.”19 In “Circe,” the episode of Ulysses that most resembles what the unconscious might look like if it were rendered in language, the obscene letters addressed to several highly respectable Dublin ladies represent the sublime culmination of the Henry Flower–Martha Clifford correspondence in its role as enjoyment of the unconscious. The erotic staging of the postal exchange between Henry and Martha is one in which Henry makes ever more obscene remarks in the anticipation of punishment. For her part, the petit-bourgeois Martha feigns increasing indignation in proportion to the progressively heightened provocation of Henry’s profanations: “Doing the indignant: a girl of good family like me, respectable character” (U 5.269– 270). The letters addressed to the society ladies in “Circe” are simply the logical extension, in the realm of the imaginary, of the pursuit of jouissance already begun in the Henry–Martha correspondence. In the latter scene, Bloom’s letters are addressed to a socially sublime ideal of Martha “doing the indignant” in the form of several ladies drawn from the highest rank of Dublin society. In proportion to the higher stakes being played for in the social order, the obscenity of the letters themselves is heightened to a delirious degree. As the Honourable Mrs. Mervyn Talboys testifies, “He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise

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him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping” (U 15.1070–1073). According to the postal principle which allows for several persons to be addressed simultaneously, the obscenity is multiplied as well as intensified, so that several Dublin ladies are able to hold up improper letters received from Bloom, with calls of “Me too. . . . Me too” (U 15.1075–1077). On Bloom’s part, the form of enjoyment derived from this heightened obscenity is that of his own increased debasement. Bloom’s letters to the Dublin ladies have in common with his scene with Bella the search, through abjection, of what Deleuze calls the “immanence of desire” that unceasingly reproduces itself. In Joyce, the motifs of immanence, debasement, and profanation related to the sending and receiving of letters combine to destabilize the order of identities and destinations represented by the postal system in its role as an institutional guarantor of the symbolic order. When Mrs. Mervyn Talboys is implored to soil Bloom’s letter “in an unspeakable manner” (U 15.1071), the appeal is to a disruption of the symbolic order of the letter by the real substance of the body as the site of the immanence of desire. The unspeakable manner of soiling the letter is presumably intended to produce a sign, a trace, or a stain which in its unreadability becomes nonetheless an obscure vector of desire. We are now close to the universe of Finnegans Wake, where Shem’s body produces an “obscene matter” to serve as the ink in which he writes “over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body” (FW 185.35–36). From the “inspissated grime of his glaucous den” he writes his “usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles,” telling himself that “every splurge on the vellum he blundered over” is “an entire operahouse . . . of enthusiastic noblewomen flinging every coronetcrimsoned stitch they had off at his probscenium” (FW 179.25–180.3). In Shem’s fantasy, as in Bloom’s and no doubt Joyce’s as well, the filth and defilement of the letter incites an upper-class feminine readership to jouissance rather than outrage, though it is not certain that these two responses are as distinct from one another as they might at fi rst appear. In any case, we have here a moment where, in Finnegans Wake, the scene of writing Ulysses is represented in terms of the material production of the letter from the substance of the body. Indeed, a good way of understanding Ulysses is to read it as the body made word, from the anti-Eucharist of the fi rst page to the breath and heartbeat of the last. It is as if everywhere Joyce sought to preserve the immanence of desire in the form of the letter itself, rather than be content with the representation of desire as the mere object of signification. If in Ulysses Joyce has succeeded in rendering the body, and by extension the entire material world, into word, then what remains for him after 1922 is to write a work in which the word is made body. This may be said to be the great project of Finnegans Wake. The letter of I.v. serves both as a figure and as a concrete instance of the letter made matter. Its status as a letter in the postal sense is indicated by its material support (“a goodish-sized sheet

Joyce the Post 167 of letterpaper”), its provenance, (“originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.),” its date (“of the last of the fi rst”), its opening, (“to Dear whom”), certain elements of its body which resemble those of a letter sent home from an Irish emigrant to America (“it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome’s health . . . & Muggy well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well”), its closing (“must now close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses”) its postscript (“pee ess from . . . affectionate”) and its signature obscured by a large-looking tea stain (FW 111.8–20). The generally reassuring signs of conformity to postal convention are soon eclipsed, however, by a host of elements that undermine any prospect of what is called a few lines later “establishing the identities in the writer complexus” (FW 114.33), that is, the identities of sender, addressee, and other potential readers, the nature of their relation to one another, and that existing between the letter itself and any of these persons. What is undermined, in other words, is the prospect of legibility as a stabilizing feature of the symbolic order. These destabilizing elements include the initial reference to the letter as the “untitled mamafesta” (FW 104.04) of ALP in her function as “Bringer of Plurabilities” (FW 104.02), the letter’s “many names at disjointed times” (FW 104.05), its “proteiform” writing (FW 107.08), the “accretions of terricious matter” (FW 114.28–29) acquired by the letter while buried in the dump of the past, the continually altered conditions of its composition, including the transformations of its “changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns” (FW 118.27–28), the inconclusive investigations of the scholar Duff-Muggli (FW 123.11), and the “numerous stabs and foliated gashes” made in the document by a pronged instrument (FW 124.2–3), accentuated by “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina” (FW 124.7–8). In this last formula, the shattering of the text into bits and pieces of type achieves in graphic manner the collapse of the symbolic import of the letter into its material body, elsewhere rendered by the letter’s subjection to stains, smears, soiling, and puncture wounds. What happens to the letter here may be understood as a textual analogy to masochistic abjection insofar as it represents the disintegration of identity in the name of the immanence of desire. The text of the Wake exposes itself to every possible wound, gash, and fracture in driving away the satisfaction of any resolution of meaning, because the pleasure of such resolution always brings its own closure. Instead, the suspension of legibility implied in the figure of the Bringer of Plurabilities may well be understood, in Deleuze’s terms, as a textual field of the immanence of desire, in which desire, the desire inherent in language, does not cease to reproduce itself: “and he passing out of one desire into its fellow” (FW 125.08). In this sense the “untitled mamafesta” denotes the condition of a text devoted to its own unauthorized manifestation, made without right or title conferred by external authority—a text defi ned by self-exposure to the infi nite modes of desire to which the letter is subject. Again, the Lacanian reading of Finnegans Wake is relevant. Meaning, for Lacan, is produced by the intersection of the imaginary and

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symbolic orders, even when it is equivocal, that is, even if a given linguistic formula can mean one thing as well as another. What takes place in the Wake, however, is a pulvérulence, a virulent pulverization 20 of equivocation to the point where the letter becomes a signifier in the real, outside the chain of signification which connects the imaginary to the symbolic orders: as in certain psychoses, the language is ground into matter that can be compared to an explosive powder which, once ignited, flashes meaning from all sides, from every word and every syllable. By short-circuiting the mediation of the imaginary, the symbolic has been converted directly into the real, 21 with the consequences of an unreadability which nonetheless shines forth as the immanence of desire in language. The letter thus signifies according to the logic of the symptom rather than that of the symbol. In Lacan’s diagnosis, Joyce’s writing is symptomatic of a response to the deficiency of the father, and takes the form of progressively radical attempts to shatter or dismantle the imposition of language (les paroles imposées): “Il finit par imposer au langage même une sorte de brisure, de décomposition, qui fait qu’il n’y a plus d’identité phonatoire [He ends up imposing on language itself a sort of shattering, a decomposition that does away with any phonatory identity].”22 By the absence of phonatory identity Lacan means the absence of an identifiable voice, of a speaking subject. He nonetheless hesitates between an analysis of the Wake which sees in it, on the one hand, an attempt at liberation from the parasitism of the imposed word (“le parasite parolier”) and, on the other hand, a total surrender to the polyphony of the word. 23 In any case, either strategy would have led to the text we know as the Wake, and either would have undermined the order of positionalities, identities, titles and authorities from which the Wake seeks to escape. In the chapter devoted to Shaun’s postal duties (III.1), the unreadability of the letter is combined with its undeliverability. Despite the best efforts of the postman, every attempt at delivery is frustrated : “Nave unlodgeable . . . No such no. . . . None so strait . . . Place scent on . . . Wrongly spilled . . . Search Unclaimed Male . . . Back in Few Minutes . . . Missing . . . Back to the P.O.” (FW 420.23–421.07). This episode denotes the limits of the postal system while nonetheless identifying the letter itself, with all its ambiguities, as binding the four principal persons of the Wake to one another (“carried of Shaun, son of Hek, written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun,” FW 420.17–19), as well as to Joyce himself, whose old addresses figure among those to which the letter is unsuccessfully carried. The episode reminds us that despite the antagonism between Shem the Penman and Shaun the Post, they are inextricably bound as brothers and equally related, on an allegorical level, to Joyce, who as a writer must join the private and insular act of composition to the open, public act of transmission and publication. Like Shem, he is the writer writing what Derrida calls the proper name, the “self exiled in upon his ego” (FW 184.6–7), while yet “interminablement confi[é] aux détours et aux errances de Shaun le postman” (Derrida 179),

Joyce the Post 169 the writer interminably bound to the detours and wanderings of Shaun, who seeks an audience and universal acclaim: “Sireland calls you . . . And may the mosse of prosperousness gather you rolling home! . . . right royal post” (FW 428.7–15). The letter of Finnegans Wake is prefigured by the postcards sent and received in Ulysses in their relative illegibility, which is the condition for their endless hermeneutic potential, and in their ultimate undeliverability, which is the condition for their endless circulation. The crazed eccentric Denis Breen may be considered an early example of the pathology known in the American popular idiom as “going postal,” that is, a violent paranoid response to the conditions imposed on the subject by the postal system. The post in fact has everything to incite the fears of the paranoiac: the possibilities of accusation, of denunciation, of exposure—all committed by the persecutor in the safety of anonymity. When Breen receives an anonymous postcard with the inscription “U.p: up,” it is difficult to know what conventional form to assign to this text: a message, an error, a fragment, an insult, a practical joke? Mrs. Breen’s interpretation, more a reading of her husband’s reaction than of what is written on the card itself, is to see “Someone taking a rise out of him” (U 8.258). But the ambiguity of the pronouns used in her next statement, “It’s a great shame for them whoever he is” (U 8.258–259) suggests that the postcard cannot be limited to a single sender and receiver. However, what is more important than the text of the inscription or the identity of its sender is its function in sending Breen on an endless round of errands in search of legal redress. Breen’s postcard is one of many documents in Ulysses, like the throwaway flyer “Elijah is Coming” (U 8.13), that pursue their itineraries through the space of Dublin. First produced from Mrs Breen’s handbag in the “Lestrygonians” episode, the postcard is subsequently taken by Breen and his wife, in “Wandering Rocks,” to the solicitor John Henry Menton’s office in Bachelor’s Walk, then to Collis and Ward’s office in Dame St. In “Cyclops,” we learn that Tom Rochford has sent Breen “for a lark” to the subsheriff’s office, where he has received less than a warm reception: “the long fellow gave him an eye as good as a process” (U 12.270). He has then gone to the Metropolitan Police station in Green St. From there, advised by Corny Kelleher to get the handwriting examined, he has gone looking for a private detective, and is shortly thereafter seen passing by the pub in Little Britain St., where his movements are reported with unfailing amusement and incredulity. A propos of the postman’s duties, Shaun remarks that “[t]here’s no sabbath for nomads” (FW 410.32), and indeed Breen seems to have been transformed into another nomadic postman, wandering through the city in search of a further destination for the postcard that he cannot allow to stop at his own address. In this respect he is also, like Shaun, a failed postman, whose attempt at delivering the famous letter of the Wake is thwarted at every potential destination by the absence, refusal, or nonexistence of the addressee. Breen’s postcard, like that letter, seems designed

170 David Spurr both to generate an endless series of readings of its cryptic inscription, and to circulate endlessly throughout the space of Dublin, here conceived as a potentially infi nite number of addresses constituting the sum of the postcard’s possible destinations. Like Breen’s postcard, the postcard produced by the sailor D. B. Murphy in the “Eumaeus” episode is post-postal, that is, it continues to circulate even after having completed its round in the official mails. It also has a symmetrical relation to the earlier case. Where Breen shows his postcard in a futile attempt to discredit the story he reads it as telling (he wants to sue the sender for libel), Murphy shows his card in an equally futile attempt to verify his own story. Put another way, where one man seeks in vain to legitimate his identity by dissociating himself from the post, the other seeks in vain to legitimate his identity by associating himself with it. Let us recall that, in the place of transit known as the cabman’s shelter, Murphy (if that is his name) produces the card in order to document his claim to have seen “maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses” (U 16.470– 471), thus inscribing his discourse in the tradition of a long line of voyagers, including Odysseus himself, who tell of their encounters with cannibals and other anthropophages. However, the postcard, showing “Choza de Indios” in Beni, Bolivia, does little to document this claim (U 16.474). Instead of maneaters in Peru, its image is a ludicrous colonial parody of the Homeric Sirens: Indian women shown in variously degraded postures (“squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning”) amid a “swarm of infants,” outside primitive shanties in Bolivia, far from any seacoast (U 16.475–478). Like the “partly obliterated” letter in Finnegans Wake (FW 111.34–35), this postcard has a “partially obliterated address and postmark” which nonetheless bears the words “Tarjeta Postal, Señor A. Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago, Chile” (U 16.488–489), causing Bloom to notice the discrepancy between the name of Murphy and that of the “fictitious addressee of the missive” (U 16.497–498). There is no evidence, however, that the name Boudin is fictitious. What Bloom perhaps means is that Murphy himself is creating a fiction in claiming to be the postcard’s addressee. In any case, the postcard remains of unknown provenance and mysterious address; it bears no message and is of dubious value in documenting either the sailor’s story or his identity. In these respects it anticipates all the aporia of the letter in the Wake, whereas, like the later letter, it nonetheless has the interest of having travelled from afar. The postmark alone shows that, of all the documents that circulate in Ulysses, this is the one that has covered the greatest distance, so that, as with the letter of the Wake, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves . . . after all that we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the earth and all it has gone through and by all means. (FW 118.31–119.01)

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The postcard and the letter, themselves postal nomads, are what remain of the wanderings over the earth—spatially, linguistically, and imaginatively—that constitute the greater subject of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Whatever its costs, the post is the modern figure of the voyage and circulation of the word. Like the many wanderings of Odysseus, the letter and the postcard serve, fi nally, as testimony to the many ways of Joyce’s two major works. NOTES 1. Cf. FW 362.36–363.02: “were you always (for that time only) what we knew how when we (from that point solely) were you know where?” 2. Jacques Derrida, La carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). Further references will appear parenthetically in the text. 3. The catalogue of the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, contains all of the major works of James Joyce. 4. Voltaire, “Poste,” Questions sur l’Encyclopédie par des amateurs (Geneva: Cramer, 1770–72, t. VIII, 219), cited in Derrida, La carte postale, 77. Translations from the French are my own. 5. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley and Adela Pinch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 232. I thank Prof. Charles Lock of the University of Copenhagen for calling my attention to this passage. 6. A number of essays have been devoted to the relation between Derrida’s La carte postale and Joyce’s work, principally Finnegans Wake. The series begins in the 1980s with Shari Benstock’s “The Letter of the Law: La Carte Postale in Finnegans Wake,” Philological Quarterly 63:2 (1984), 169–170, which shows how the postal system in Derrida’s work serves as an analogy for the dynamic of desire in Joyce: “This trajectory of desire, which is also a system of postes, begins in the necessity to discover desire’s destination and authority, to chart the space between desire and its object, to act out the sexual impulse for which dreaming and writing are only transferences. To trace the path of this desire, to follow the system of the postes, is to discover desire and its object, to know the destination of the love/lust letter, and to know why it must always be lost.” A decade later, Murray McArthur’s “The Example of Joyce: Derrida Reading Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 32 (Winter 1995), 227–241, examines the double structure of desire (as impulse toward both death and reproduction) and sees Giacomo Joyce as particularly important to Derrida’s work. A lucid account of both essays is given in Alan Roughley’s Reading Derrida Reading Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). Most recently, Andrew J. Mitchell’s “Meaning Postponed: Finnegans Wake and The Post Card,” James Joyce Quarterly 44:1 (2006), 59–76, reads the figure of Shaun as a kind of martyr to “postality” as différance, deferral, and dispersal, one who seeks in vain to achieve self-presence and, through his nationalism, a pure identity with Ireland. 7. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 14–15. 8. Giorgio Agamben, “L’homme est celui qui rend possible,” Le Temps (Geneva: 24 February 2007). 9. Cf. FW 256.29–30: “G.P.O. is zentrum and D.U.T.C. are radients,” for the General Post Office and the Dublin United Tramway Company, respectively. 10. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire (Livre XXIII: Le sinthome), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 86.

172 David Spurr 11. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire (Livre II), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 231. 12. Lecture by Gilles Deleuze (“Anti-Œdipe et autres reflexions”), Université de Paris 8-Vincennes (27 May 1980), http://www.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article. php3?id_article=70. 13. Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch: La Vénus à la Fourrure (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 18–20. 14. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 623. 15. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire (Livre II), 226. 16. Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch: La Vénus à la Fourrure, 108. 17. In response to my inquiry, Fritz Senn provides this note: “It seems that if you posted before midnight the letter would be delivered the following day. You had to pay an extra 6d for that service. The only late box still in existence in 2005 was at Trafalgar Square, according to one source. Another one seems to imply that there were “Too late” marks stamped on envelopes posted in the late box.” 18. In “Circe,” Gerty McDowell is accused of “writing the gentleman false letters,” suggesting that possibly she is “Martha Clifford” (U 15.380). However, Martha later confesses, “My real name is Peggy Griffi n” (U 15.765–766). 19. Colette Soler, “The paradoxes of the symptom in psychoanalysis,” Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 101. 20. Commenting on a draft of this essay, Guillemette Bolens remarks that Lacan’s neologism “pulvérulence” suggests, in addition to “pulvérisation,” the words “virulence” et “verrue” (wart). “It creates the image of a pulverization the effect of which is virulent, like that of a virus, and the symptom of which appears on the surface of the body.” 21. Colette Soler, “The paradoxes of the symptom in psychoanalysis,” 99. 22. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire (Livre XXIII: Le sinthome), 96. 23. Lacan, Le séminaire (Livre XXIII), 97.

10 Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’ The Echo of Leitmotifs in James Joyce’s Literary Landscape Katherine O’Callaghan

Joyce’s abundant use of repetition, far from inducing a sense of monotony, serves to liberate the multiple resonances latent within repeated words, phrases, and images in his works. Concurrent with the linear trajectory of his texts, instances of repetition attain the capacity to transport the reader between distant and dislocated junctures, provoking a spatial as well as temporal reading process fuelled by the reader’s memory. The resonating motif may not replace syntax in Joyce’s writing, but through its manifestation as a “leitmotif” (literally a leading motif) complicates and interrupts the uni-directional flow of the text. The leitmotif sounds a lingering keynote, a multidirectional calling note which has a profound effect on the reader. The interpreting reader makes connections across hundreds of pages resulting in a performance “space” beyond and beside linear narrative. Here is a sort of linguistic magic-realism whereby coincidences and connections occur not on the level of subject and action, but on the level of aesthetics and language. And where the subject and technique coincide the effect is magnified: what can be termed the “call and response” leitmotif recurs as an intertextual beacon throughout Joyce’s works and elucidates his aesthetic notion of powerful tensions vibrating between distant points, eternally in the process of “calling” to each other. This essay investigates this key leitmotif, which provides a microcosmic demonstration in content of the broader stylistic technique in question.

CONSIDERATIONS OF THE LEITMOTIF The term “leitmotif,” fi rst used in relation to the music of Richard Wagner, has been transposed to literary criticism from the field of music.1 However the origins of such a technique may lie closer to the literary world. Timothy Martin points out the leitmotif’s “apparent origin as a device with what may be regarded as literary properties,”2 and notes that Wagner considered the idea to have come from the Greek chorus, while another practitioner, Thomas Mann, considered it to have roots in the Homeric epithet. Clive Hart suggested that “[t]he quasi-ritualistic repetition of key-phrases in

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narrative goes back even further, beyond the origins of writing.”3 Indeed, the leitmotif’s origins in such oral contexts (folk stories, theater, recited narratives) are apparent in the manner in which Joyce releases its latent performativity in his prose writing. The clearest source for Joyce’s use of the leitmotif is, of course, Wagner. Martin gives the following defi nition of the Wagnerian leitmotif: “a brief musical phrase that has become attached to a particular character or theme and that reappears, often altered, in appropriate contexts.” Martin chooses recurrent phrases in Joyce’s writing such as “agenbite of inwit” and considers them to be leitmotifs because they “like Wagner’s musical phrases, recur and draw their contexts together.”4 That the recurrence of the leitmotif has an effect on the previous and future instances of its appearance differentiates it from a straightforward motif. This effect goes beyond the simple act of repetition, and connects the reader to various moments in the text in a translinear fashion. The resultant movement back and forward of the reader has been discussed by David Herman who writes that “[r]eading itself becomes a back-and-forth—“Fro. To, fro” (U 11.47) or even a “Fro, to: to, fro:” (U 11.1113).” Herman links this process to an experience of simultaneity: “The narrative, in other words, always unfolds on two separate planes of syntagmatic or successive structure.”5 The literary leitmotif is further differentiated from a basic motif by virtue of its evocation of simultaneity and its ability, similar to that of music, to draw on the realm of nebeneinander.6 The reading process involved in interacting with these literary leitmotifs is of course in sympathy with, but extends, Wolfgang Iser’s notion that “a text comes into being—is formed— only when it is being experienced by an actual reader; that process, is, above all, a temporal one.”7 Jean-Pierre Barricelli’s comments on Thomas Mann’s use of the leitmotif provide some interesting points of comparison with that of Joyce. He writes that the leitmotif is “a short literary ‘subject’ that inflates and acquires extended and expanded resonances of meaning.”8 “Resonance” is an important word here, suggesting that the object has an impact beyond itself; meanings resonate outward in every direction from the leitmotif, while also drawing attention to their source. The dramatic sounding of the tuning fork in “Sirens” is an aural representation of the resonating leitmotif, projecting concentric circles outward and signaling its position to the approaching tapping piano tuner. The overlapping juxtaposition of numerous such occurrences provides an intricate web of meaning in Joyce’s writing, illuminated by the reader’s memory. Barricelli sees an idea of movement and momentum in the leading motif. He suggests that Mann’s usage has the effect of recalling experiences (“thus drawing into an essential unity an array of seemingly disparate ideas”) and that Mann “allows these motifs in turn to spawn other motifs.”9 This idea of the motif “spawn[ing]” other motifs is reminiscent of Joyce’s coining of the term “idée-mère,” as a translation of “leitmotif.”10 Barricelli writes

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of Mann’s Tonio Kröger that “Mann himself suggests that the novel be read more than once to feel the leitmotif structure: for a leitmotif pushes a memory button and need not be recalled immediately to remain itself, just as it can be changed and modified according to varying situations.”11 Joyce, like Mann, desired his works to be read more than once, and there is no doubt that upon a second reading the repeated leitmotifs reveal further signification and vibrant meanings. The leitmotif as it appears in Joyce’s writing can now be understood to generate several possible effects and ideas: fi rstly, it is more than a motif; secondly, it resonates beyond itself; thirdly, this resonance has a retrospective effect on earlier instances and a potential effect on future instances; fourthly, it is akin to a “memory button”; fifthly, it can be better accessed through multiple readings; and sixthly, it can have the effect of producing further motifs. Furthermore it might be argued that the leitmotif effect creates a “space” in which the reader performs. “Space” in this sense might correspond to that which Maurice Blanchot has explored in his work The Space of Literature. Blanchot traces a space opened by the enactment of the work: “[T]he work is a work only when it becomes the intimacy shared by someone who reads it, a space violently opened up by the context between the power to speak and the power to hear.”12 In his seminal essay, Joseph Frank suggests that “modern literature, exemplified by such writers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, is moving in the direction of spatial form.”13 Joyce’s writing is “spatial” in Frank’s use of the word, in that the reader “is intended to approach the . . . work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence” and “to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.”14 Joyce dramatically signposts his texts’ ability to provoke such a phenomenon by the multiple appearances of a “call and response” dynamic. Appearing most frequently in his lyrical passages, this particular leitmotif signals the continuous, incomplete, and magnetic power interconnecting instances of leitmotifs, collated in the reader’s mind. Although of course also a straightforward motif, the dominant qualities of this trope of “call and response” allow it to function primarily as a leitmotif, its meaning on a naturalistic level subsumed to its powerful resonance through repetition.

THE “CALL AND RESPONSE” LEITMOTIF: HEARING THE AESTHETIC OF JOYCE A voice from beyond the world was calling (P 167).

Tending to come from “afar,” the recurring, sonorous “call” in Joyce’s works is generally the instruction, order or invitation to “come.” The response it evokes within the text varies from positive (“coming” or “yes”)

176 Katherine O’Callaghan to silence. The beckoning call and response tends to occur during the lyrical fi nal passages of stories, chapters, and books. It can be found in the poetry of Chamber Music through to the fi nal paragraph of Finnegans Wake. Its repetition throughout Dubliners is one of the linking devices in the book. Stephen Dedalus experiences it in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Bloom is witness to various beckoning calls throughout his day: from the immanent arrival of Elijah to the climactic “Come to me!” of the aria “M’Appari” in the “Sirens” episode. The “call from afar” (U 11.855) is particularly prevalent in Finnegans Wake where it takes on various guises such as “avoice from afi re” (FW 3.09), climaxing, in the closing paragraph as “Far calls” with its ultimate response: “Coming, far!” (FW 628.13). This particular leitmotif is vibrant and overt in some instances, and more subtle in others, but undoubtedly its importance increases through repetition (albeit with slight variations): the repeated pattern of a beckoning call brings into focus certain moments, adds “overtones,” and forces the reader to experience them anew. This use of repetition creates multiple layers of meaning in the text and allows the reader to experience such heterogeneity temporally, but also in particular instants of time. It is important to note that the calls have a resonance beyond their function on the naturalistic level: collectively they sound a tone which gathers momentum throughout the works. Interestingly, this technique of accretion aligns the leitmotif with music: it operates in the manner in which musical notes, motifs, or phrases attain “meaning” over time (indeed it is often referred to as a “note”). These leitmotifs then form what might be described as nodal points, junctures at which these multiple meanings coalesce. For the reader such techniques evoke an experience of return, or nostos, a homecoming. This idea again is akin to an effect within the structure of music whereby the listener experiences a sense of homecoming upon reaching the tonic note, a key phrase, a fi nal or perfect cadence, or a chorus.15 It can also be read in the fact that the answer to a call, the response, is by nature an action of return: the “call and response” (or indeed call and countercall) leitmotif is also one of venture and return, of ebb and flow. The leitmotif is referred to throughout this essay by the name “Call and Response” but, as will be shown, the call on occasion appears alone. However, the nature of the call is to open a space for response, and so a call without response may not be simply a call, rather it may be considered an unanswered call, one which is partnered with a silence as resonant as a response. In the manner of Poe’s purloined letter, which Joyce evokes in Finnegans Wake, the power of the call does not necessarily lie in its content but rather in its existence. In a broader sense this paradigm of a “call and a response” sets up an oral performative dynamic within the works, requiring a speaker and a listener. It can manifest itself in different methods of communication: the long-distance telephone call from “Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (U

Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’ 177 3.39–40); the call of the tuning-fork in “Sirens” (U 11.313–316); Elijah’s contact details: “You call me up by sunphone any old time” (U 15.2206– 2207); the telegraph: “Nother dying come home father” (U 3.199); all of which might require “wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters . . . set for reception of message” (U 15.1500–1502). The call tends to come from afar, is often a nightcall, and is at times associated with birds, and the sea, as experienced by Stephen, Eveline, and Anna Livia in particular. Joyce evokes a projected imagined space between the near and the far which is simultaneously vague and defi nitive. The positioning of the call as “afar” and “beyond the world” (P 167) aligns it with religion, mysticism, and death. It also produces resonance on an aesthetic level with the fi nal image of snow falling throughout the universe in “The Dead.” The Siren barmaids in Ulysses are described in relation to their comparative positions: “Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar?” (U 11.59); “Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar” (U 11.112). This pattern is repeated several times (U 11.338, U 11.937, U 11.1269) and transposed to the depiction of Simon Dedalus whistling “his lips that cooed a moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying” (U 11.854–855). The description of Simon picks up on the lyrics of “The Croppy Boy” as depicted in the episode: “The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth’s fatigue made grave approach and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men and true” (U 11.1007–1009). If Joyce was drawn to his home country, he was also skeptical of the pull of nationalism. Here the lyrics of this patriotic ballad indicate once more the episode’s theme of treacherous calls. The distant position of the source of the calls is emphasized when the word “far” is repeated insistently, in the manner of a Morse Code, in conjunction with the tapping of the piano tuner’s cane, at the end of the episode: “Far. Far. Far. Far./ Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap” (U 11.1185–1186). The specifically geographical quality of the call, mapped in terms of distance, points to its underlying link with Joyce’s own exilic condition and the exile’s notions of home, identity, and distance. The desire to create distance, from home, religion, and country, appears to have been a particular fascination for Joyce himself, one which he imbues in the character of Stephen. The constant, even uncanny, returns to the memory of his homeland are thus all the more striking. The very idea of a call is dependent on distance: a gap, or a need, a space between caller and receiver. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode Stephen remarks, “—Where there is a reconciliation . . . there must have been fi rst a sundering” (U 9.334–335). His statement, in the context of the “call and response” leitmotif, can be interpreted as meaning that for the call to come from afar, distance must fi rst be created, for the absence to be lamented it must fi rst be formed. The “content” of the call is frequently “Come,” a word which in common with the notion of the call, by its very nature suggests a distance, “a sundering,” as well as an attempt to reconcile that

178 Katherine O’Callaghan sundering. The word “come” contains both the “space between,” and the possibility or promise of reconciliation of two entities. Furthermore the answer, “Coming” both maintains the current situation of distance and evokes the future possibility of union. Both words contain a tension which allows the simultaneous existence of distance and closeness, journey and homecoming. The tension of interconnectedness thus evoked is elaborated upon by Bloom in his musings on magnetism in “Nausicaa.” Back of everything magnetism. Earth for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement. And time, well that’s the time the movement takes. Then if one thing stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it’s all arranged. Magnetic needle tells you what’s going on in the sun, the stars. Little piece of steel iron. (U 13.987–992) Bloom then inadvertently describes the earlier effect of the struck tuning fork beckoning the piano tuner: “When you hold out the fork. Come. Come. Tip” (U 13.992). This magnetic tension (“Are you all in this vibration?”[U 15.2199–2200]) points to an important idea: the creation of space through sundering for the purposes of reconciliation which is “not yet” (FW 3.10), which is immanent. Stephen expands on this concept of inherent compulsion when he discusses the same idea in musical terms (and for Stephen the call is very often associated with music): “[T]he fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which. . . . / THE CAP / Which? Finish. You can’t. / STEPHEN / (with an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octaves. Which” (U 15.2105–2112). Stuart Gilbert explains, “After the dominant comes inevitably the return. Thus Stephen expounds the perfection of the octave.”16 The dominant is the fifth note of the scale, thus once it has been reached, no further step can be taken without the movement being one of return, either forward to the octave, or back to the original tonic note. Thus the movement from the dominant is by nature one of return. In fact, in music it is thought that the dominant has an urge, or need, to return to the tonic. In the fi nal appearance of the “call and response” leitmotif we see the clearest expression of the longing for return from the furthest point, the greatest possible interval: “Far calls. Coming, far!” (FW 628.13). The “call and response” leitmotif is so recurrent and varied that it is often difficult (and perhaps undesirable) to delimit its meaning. However for the purposes of the argument we may discuss its occurrence in particular circumstances before returning to the crucial issue of the idea of a call itself. The call manifests itself through various guises: as a religious call, as a patriotic call, as a sexual call, as the call of life, as the call of death, as the call of a foreign land, as the call back to one’s own home, as the call of artistic vocation. Obviously, several of these categories overlap: the call of

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sexual entrancement, as embodied in the Homeric Sirens, is a call of death; the call of patriotism is likewise associated with the hanging noose of death and with the lure of the past; the artistic vocation is associated with the call of life, in that it evokes the grand “Yes” which Joyce puts in the voice of Molly Bloom, as well as Stephen’s desire to cry “to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him” (P 172). What follows is a short outline of some of the themes associated with the trope: religion, the artistic life, death and longing, as well as a study of the effect of the repeated call itself.

THE RELIGIOUS VOCATION The notion of the “vocation for the priesthood” is raised by the child narrator of the short story “An Encounter” (D 19) and is also present in the opening story, “The Sisters.” While the Stephen of Ulysses can contain the idea of a God within a “shout in the street” (U 2.386), the younger Stephen of Portrait experiences at close range the idea of the religious calling. The director of studies holds out to him the possibility of a vocation: “Perhaps you are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself” (P 157). Stephen’s response is one of rejection, despite the temptation held out to him: “[t]o receive that call, Stephen . . . ” (P 158). His rejection is later described thus: “[W]hen the moment had come for him to obey the call he had turned aside, obeying a wayward instinct”(P 165). Stephen’s rejection of the call is seen as an act of “non serviam” (P 117), reminding us that Stephen is ever wary of the calls which may lead him away from his potential destiny. The “wayward” turning is echoed in the phrase “[h]e turned seaward” (P 165)—one of many examples of the sea providing an alternative call. Of course, despite this rejection, for Stephen (and perhaps for Joyce) the pattern of the call, albeit in different forms, will recur over and over, to be rejected or accepted. The idea of God calling man to “come” resonates through Chapter 3 of Portrait, with Stephen believing that “[e]very word of it was for him” (P 115): “—And then the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling His creature man to account” (P 118). Stephen is unsure of what the call might mean and responds to it as though to a telephone call: “God had called him. Yes? What? Yes?” (P 125). Later the content of the call is revealed: “He calls you to Him . . . Come to Him” (P 134–135). The “call from afar” phrase is deftly overlaid with the story of Moses and the burning bush in the opening pages of Finnegans Wake: “avoice from afi re” (FW 3.9), once more suggesting God as the source of the call. Throughout Ulysses the announcement that “Elijah is Coming” is literally encountered again and again as the throwaway on which it is printed winds its way down the Liffey and to the waiting arms of the cold sea. The announcement of Elijah’s imminent arrival comes at the beginning of “Lestrygonians”: “Elijah is Coming . . .” (U 8.13) and recurs in the

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“Wandering Rocks” episode (U 10.294). Its recurrence echoes Bloom’s mantra on advertisements: “Because, you see . . . for an advertisement you must have repetition. That’s the whole secret” (U 12.1147–1148). By the end of the “Cyclops” episode Bloom himself will be called, having taken on the guise of the immanent Elijah: “And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai!” (U 12.1914–1915). This pronouncement is followed by a dramatic deus ex machina escape by Bloom in a moment of ascent, unusual in that a fall, or a downward motion, generally accompanies the “call and response” leitmotif.17 Bloom’s movement toward the beckoning “father” (“Abba”) is echoed in, or foreshadows, the fi nal scene of Finnegans Wake where Anna Livia pronounces her readiness to return to the great sea: “I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father” (FW 628.1–2). Indeed the “Far” of the fi nal “Far calls” (FW 628.13) is glossed by Roland McHugh as the Danish for father.18 In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode the “Elijah-is-coming” leaflet is recalled in the phrase “Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb” (U 14.1580), an intensification of the father/child theme in that the trope of the lamb is associated with Rudy. The “Circe” episode, which is the prime site for moments of repetition and echo, announces “the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah” (U 15.2175–2176) and grants “Adonai” a voice: “(From on high the voice of Adonai calls) / ADONAI / Dooooooooooog!” (U 15.4709–4711). In this most parodic episode we hear God’s call, and, like a tuning fork drawing out the same note from the orchestra, what he summons is his mirrored self. The religious manifestations of the call, from the vocation held out to Stephen to the overt beckoning of Bloom, have the effect of challenging Joyce’s elaborate physical and temporal mapping of the city, not only coming from an elusive place “on high,” but also resonating with what is “not yet.”

THE ARTISTIC VOCATION The “call and response” leitmotif is perhaps most overtly depicted in moments surrounding Stephen Dedalus and his epiphanies of destiny, suggesting that the “call” might be the more secular one of artistic vocation. By the end of Portrait the leitmotif is urgent and visually dramatic: The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth. (P 252)

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Earlier in Portrait Stephen clearly hears the call on Dollymount strand just before he sees the “bird-girl” (and just after he has rejected the call of the church): He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede, to recede: and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling. (P 167) We can note the marked used of repetition: “to recede,” “Again!” and “music” are each repeated three times. Joyce regularly uses such overt repetition in his most lyrical passages, and it points to the use of repetition over the wider structure. The meaning of the call which Stephen hears in the bird-girl scene is elaborated on in the paragraphs following: “This was the call of life” (P 169); “crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him” (P 172); “Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call (P 172). Stephen’s leaping soul in answer to the call is directly counterpointed in “The Dead” by Gabriel’s soul swooning in response to the snow. Stephen’s exteriorizing of his urges and potential destiny in the form of a call which comes from “afar” is of course in itself evocative of the entire artistic process, the projection outward of the inner self. This projection is then expanded to create a further distance, this time between writer and reader, and involves the creation of a “Space” in which to create art. Stephen’s calling, his inclination toward the artistic life, appears bound with the call to leave his home and homeland and move into a state of exile, physically creating the remove which will allow his art to flourish. Jean Michel Rabaté has pointed out that Joyce felt “very early an attraction to Paris—called by Paris, almost a ‘calling,’ which receives momentous mythological overtones in Ulysses.”19 While Stephen’s actions and motivations are often subtly mocked by Joyce, it is true to say that Joyce obviously shared this need to create distance from the place which he would then spend a lifetime writing about. Ironically, at a remove it is then Dublin which becomes the far point from which the call emanates, drawing Joyce’s imagination, to elegize and critique it. Indeed the pursuit of distance for the creation of homecoming is very clearly demonstrated by Leopold Bloom, a character whose thoughts relentlessly return to home, while he physically removes himself with the help of often spurious excuses, and delays his inevitable return. The momentum of the book is always toward this nostos, emphasized by the key character’s association with the wandering Odysseus and the “Wandering Jew” figure. Bloom’s path outward and away from Eccles Street is deemed necessary so as to facilitate his eventual return and is indicative of the urge toward sundering/reconciliation which Joyce introduces into his characters’ lives.

182 Katherine O’Callaghan Stephen desires to escape the “nets” (P 203) which hold him, be they religious, national, colonial, or familial. Joyce portrays him “walking rapidly lest his father’s shrill whistle might call him back” (P 164), and yet, according to his own ideas, his departure holds the seeds of a possible reconciliation. While the Stephen of Portrait writes that his movement away from his mother’s faith was “a fi rst noiseless sundering of their lives” (P 165), the Stephen of Ulysses, as we have seen, suggests that a “sundering” is necessary for a “reconciliation.” However, the model of a necessary distance is embedded in Stephen’s artistic epiphanies, which revolve around a beckoning call which comes from a quasi-magical geographical location, “beyond the world,” and results in Stephen’s “soul . . . swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings” (P 172).

CALL: NO ANSWER The paradigm of Stephen responding to or rejecting calls is emphasized in the opening pages of Ulysses by a succession of cries and calls beginning with Mulligan’s beckoning call to Stephen: “Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely: / —Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!” (U 1.6–8). Mulligan also emits a call which is answered from a source which the reader is unsure of: “He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention . . . Two strong shrill whistles answered though the calm” (U 1.24–27). This moment is recapitulated in the opening of the “Circe” episode “Whistles call and answer,” before the respective parts receive their own dramatic parts: “THE CALL” and “THE ANSWER” (U 15.9–13). In “Telemachus” Mulligan’s disembodied voice travels to Stephen interrupting the specter of his dead mother’s call: “Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words. / —Dedalus, come down . . . / —I’m coming, Stephen said, turning” (U 1.281–286). Stephen is very clearly depicted ignoring or rejecting the final call of the “Telemachus” episode: “A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea . . . It called again . . . far out on the water . . . / Usurper” (U 1.741–744). The identity of the caller in this moment is ambiguous, as is the source of the word “[u]surper,” although we can read this moment as a precursor of the Sirens’ call. While Stephen may be commenting on Mulligan (or Haines), it is also possible to read the word as a disengaged voice commenting from the sea, that of the drowned man speaking to the living, or even the voice of the sea itself the “great sweet mother” (U 1.77–78). This female consciousness, with its obvious associations with his own mother, projects guilt on to Stephen, who has already represented his

Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’ 183 mother as resenting his ongoing life: “No, mother! Let me be and let me live.” (U 1.279). When Stephen returns to the sea in “Proteus” he will recall that moment vividly as he reiterates his decision not to return to the “cold domed room of the tower” (U 3.271): “Call: no answer” (U 3.278). The unanswered call is also in evidence in Joycean moments which are less associated with escape than with paralysis. While the call in “Araby” is a passing one “I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out” (D 35), in “Eveline” the call is explicit: —Come! All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing. —Come! No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish! —Eveline! Evvy! He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. (D 41)

Eveline’s inability to answer the beckoning call (which is dangerous to her: “he would drown her”) can be perceived as her flaw. The fi nal lines of “The Boarding House” continue the theme: At last she heard her mother calling. She started to her feet and ran to the banisters. —Polly! Polly! —Yes, mamma? —Come down, dear. Mr Doran wants to speak to you. Then she remembered what she had been waiting for. (D 69)

Polly answers her beckoning call, although we are left with the impression that she is sleep-walking into her new life: “[S]he no longer saw the white pillows on which her gaze was fi xed” (D 68). Sometimes it is not that the call goes unanswered but that it does not come and silence reigns. Mr. Duffy waits at the end for his “call”: He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears . . . He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone. (D 117)

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Eliza in “The Sisters” also listens for the sound but there is none forthcoming from the dead: “She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffi n” (D 18).

THE “LONGINDYING CALL” (U 11.12) While the “call” has been shown to have concrete thematic meanings (exile, home, religion, artistic life), the leitmotif in itself functions on another level. The “one longdrawn calling note” (P 167) of the Portrait beach scene discussed previously is most directly and dramatically echoed in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses where it becomes the piercing sound of the tuning fork with its “Longer in dying call” (U 11.316). 20 The action of the tuning fork is presented in mixed tenses: “From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now poised that it now throbbed” (U 11.313–315). 21 The tuning fork functions as a signal calling the blind to it and is thus emblematic of the episode as a whole which contains multiple examples of the blind (literal or willful) being led by calls. While the complex symbolism of the tuning fork sending out its call is only made apparent through an awareness of the accumulative appearances of earlier calls, the more ambiguous nature of the call in “Sirens” likewise casts its cautionary shadow back on to the call which Stephen hears in Portrait. The “one longdrawn calling note” of Portrait is also given verbal content or “meaning” in the other sonic pinnacle of the “Sirens” episode. The climax of “M’Appari,” from Flotow’s opera Martha, involves a high Bb for the tenor on the word “Come!” resolved in the words “to me.” Between the word “Come” and the concluding “to me” Joyce represents, in an extraordinarily evocative passage, the fl ight, the turns, the shape of the longdrawn out note which is being held by the singer, here Simon Dedalus: —Come . . . ! It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness. . . . . . —To me! (U 11.744–751)

There is obviously a strong sexual undercurrent in this climactic sentence which occurs concurrently with Molly’s act of adultery. Molly is, of course, one of the key Sirens who draws Boylan (physically) and Bloom (emotionally and imaginatively) to her throughout the episode. However, it is the female, Martha (a possible amalgamation of Martha Clifford and Molly

Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’ 185 Bloom), who is beckoned in the aria. A later Siren-like call is received by Bloom on the beach, but its originator Gerty McDowell is distanced from the prototype of the knowing Siren: “A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been! He of all men!” (U 13.746–748). The musical aspect of the Siren call appears over and over in Joyce’s writing, and music itself is given powers of paralysis. Gretta Conroy, for example, is literally spellbound by the music of her past: “She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also” (D 209). Gretta, in her “Distant Music” pose, is in fact a poetic mirror echo of an earlier moment in the Dubliners collection when Mrs. Kearney is instead released from her statue-like pose by the fi rst note of music: Mrs Kearney had to stand aside to allow the baritone and his accompanist to pass up to the platform. She stood still for an instant like an angry stone image and, when the first notes of the song struck her ear, she caught up her daughter’s cloak and said to her husband: —Get a cab! (D 149)

Humorously, Gabriel Conroy is also in the process of hailing cabs. Once more we find a moment of calling itself signaling to an earlier instance, uncovering for the reader the intricate lattice created by Joyce’s leitmotif technique.

“THE DEAD” AND THE CALL OF DEATH The phrase “Longindying,” associated with the call, holds within it not only a long-drawn-out death but also a longing to die: the pull of death is evident throughout Joyce’s work (Gabriel’s meditation on Michael Furey, Rudolph Virag’s suicide, the Sirens, Anna Livia’s final movement toward death). It has often been suggested that Gabriel’s swooning soul and westward journey at the end of “The Dead” is a movement toward death: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (D 224). The phrase “like the descent of their last end,” which seems to maintain an ambiguous reference to both the snow and the souls of the living and the dead, is an echo of Mary Jane’s earlier statement regarding the monks: “The coffin . . . is to remind them of their last end” (D 201), and thus suggests that the final call of “The Dead” is to accept the inevitability of death. Riquelme notes that the tapping of the snow at the end of the story not only echoes Michael Furey throwing gravel at Gretta’s window, but also answers Gabriel’s own tapping earlier in the night: “Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window” (D 192). Riquelme points out the oddity of Gabriel tapping on the window, and of his apparent ability to hear the snow doing so at the end (with a suggestion that it is Michael Furey who

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has been summoned by Gabriel’s own beckoning tap). The tapping therefore takes on dense meanings, as does the repeated appearance of the word “snow”: “[T]he flurry of closing references crystallizes our sense that snow has been mentioned frequently.”22 The effect is similar to that which occurs in relation to the “call and response” leitmotif, whereby appearances in clusters heighten awareness of individual occurrences. Gabriel feels the presence of the “other world”: “[S]ome impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world” (D 220). His fear of the return of Michael Furey is made clearer when Joyce reimagines that famous fi nal paragraph of “The Dead” in his poem “She Weeps Over Rahoon.” Here Michael Furey’s call from the grave (albeit to Nora/Gretta) is made far more explicit: “Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling, / Where my dark lover lies. / Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling, / At grey moonrise.”23 The coldness of the “dark rain” in the poem, in contrast with the almost blanket-like quality of the snow in “The Dead,” changes the atmosphere and places the “dark lover” in a stranger juxtaposition to the living, one which more explicitly reimagines the conversation between the living and the dead in Thomas Moore’s ballad “O Ye Dead.” We are reminded of the emphasis on life in Gabriel’s “warm trembling fi ngers” (D 192). Through the rhythmic pattern of the poem, the repeated chiasmic “falling” motif of the fi nal passage of “The Dead” is linked with the “calling” motif. Although Gabriel’s affi rmative answer to the call at the end of “The Dead” isn’t made explicit, any ambiguity lies in its content, perhaps a response to Molly Ivors’ literal call to come west, or a more symbolic movement toward national identity or indeed death. The natural world is interrupted by a call from an elusive elsewhere, one which is close to the spaces of sleep and death. For Gabriel it is the “region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead” (D 223), for Stephen “some new world” which is “traversed by cloudy shapes and beings” (P 172). The zone from which this beckoning call emanates is elusive, “ethereal,” it is “everywhere” and “all around,” a place without geographical (or linguistic) boundaries: “the endlessnessnessness. . . . . .” (U 11. 748–750). In Ulysses Stephen feels the pull of a ghost in a phrase which alludes to the uncanny nature of the call: “My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen!” (U 1.628–629). Indeed Stephen is haunted by his mother, whom he appears to reject when he ambiguously exclaims “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!” (U 1.278). And yet later in the evening Stephen ponders on his power over the dead: “If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call?” (U 14.1113–1114). The congruence of ghosts, perhaps from “the other world,” with a calling, and the attempted communication between the living and the dead, reemerges in the supernatural ending of the “Circe” episode. Bloom repeatedly calls Stephen (the text emphasizes the repetition, as it emphasizes Stephen’s lack of response):

Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’ 187 BLOOM Eh! Ho! (There is no answer. He bends again.) Mr Dedalus! (there is no answer) The name if you call. Somnambulist. (he bends again and, hesitating, brings his mouth near the face of the prostrate form) Stephen! (There is no answer. He calls again.) Stephen! (U 15.4924–4928)

Bloom’s repeated call to Stephen may fail but it serves to bring forth the apparition of his lost child Rudy: “BLOOM / (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!” (U 15.4961–4962). Rudy, like Stephen, poignantly does not answer Bloom. The call from the dead may be heard but communication does not follow.

THE TOWER AND THE LIGHTHOUSE The opening section of the “Sirens” episode contains the phrase “[a] moonlight nightcall: far, far” (U 11.31), a pre-echo of the description of Simon Dedalus whistling. The sound “far, far” is echoed in Finnegans Wake in the phrase “pharphar” (FW 215.01), which is read aloud by Joyce in his gramophone recording as a distant “far, far.” On the page, however, the spelling suggests a lighthouse and this is confi rmed by the reference to the Poolbeg lighthouse, and the Kish lightship, in Dublin Bay: “Is that the Poolbeg fl asher beyant, pharphar, or a fi reboat coasting nyar the Kishtna” (FW 215.01–02). The lighthouse is a key image and one in a series of tower images which recur throughout the works. It is also an image of light, like the voice from “a fi re.” As is often the case in Joyce, where an aural motif emerges, a visual image is not far behind. The climactic vocal “Come to me” of “M’Appari” discussed previously, for example, is depicted in visual terms, again as a bright light, a moment of epiphanic claritas perhaps. The lighthouse is sending out a signal, a nightcall, and by the end of Finnegans Wake “far” may even be issuing the call to come: “Far calls. Coming, far!” (FW 628.13). The tower becomes one more idée fi xe which Joyce returns to over and over, in the guise of the Pigeonhouse, the Poolbeg Lighthouse, the Martello Tower, and the round towers of Ireland. In Finnegans Wake, the most potent image of the tower is that of the tower of Babel. A tower is the place unreached by the young boys in “An Encounter”: “It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House” (D 24). Stephen in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses “turned northeast and crossed the fi rmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse” (U 3.159–160). Ellmann notes a possible source for the story remarking that Joyce and his brother Stanislaus played truant for a day from Belvedere: “The two brothers planned an expedition along the strand as far as the Pigeon House—the public power plant which serves Dublin” (JJII 47).

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As can be seen from this example of the tower motif, one of the effects of the recurrent “call and response” leitmotif is to bring into focus other repeated motifs and connections. We recall Thomas Mann’s idea, as put forward by Barricelli, that leitmotifs “spawn” other motifs. 24 Alertness to the resonance between Stephen’s phrase, “Call: no answer” on Sandymount strand and Anna Livia’s final “Far calls. Coming, far!” suggests new readings of the closing passage of Finnegans Wake. As the great river Anna Livia flows out into the sea, we encounter a series of apparently disjointed phrases: “There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given!” (FW 628.12–15). “The keys to. Given!” is customarily interpreted as meaning that Joyce has given us the keys to reading or deciphering the book within it. However, what strike me on reading these lines are the echoes of Stephen’s dramatic moment in “Proteus”: “He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes” (U 3.276). “Take all, keep all.” (U 3.279), a memorable phrase of Stephen’s, is reiterated in “Take.” Both scenes take place in Dublin Bay as the Liffey pours out into the sea. In the Wake passage the phrase, “There’s where” suggests that a location of note is being pointed out by Anna Livia as she flows into the bay. The ripples which the call leitmotif has produced indicate that the location might be one, or more, of the various key moments in Joyce’s earlier works which occur on Dublin’s “swerve of shore” and “bend of bay” (FW 3.1–2): Stephen’s various epiphanic moments, Bloom’s sexual encounters with Gerty, and Molly by the rhododendrons on Howth Head. In this fi nal passage the leitmotif-conscious reader might follow Anna Livia’s directive “There’s where” and fi nd the spectral presence of an unknowingly prophetic bard, Stephen Dedalus, watching her movement into the sea: “The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here” (U 3.282).

CONCLUSION Within Joyce’s texts noncartographical spaces are opened by various beckoning calls. Despite Joyce’s emphasis on specific geographical locations of exile (“Trieste-Zurich-Paris”) the source of the call to artistic exile has an elusive dimension. The artistic call comes from “beyond the world,” aligning it with the religious call, the region of Gabriel’s meditations and the ghostly realm of Rudy. On a naturalistic level, the “call and response” leitmotif may be the simple calling and responding of two people or two sounds, for example, the two washerwomen calling to each other across the darkening river in the ALP chapter; but on an aesthetic level it signifies a complex interplay of multiple motifs and themes which Joyce has successfully transplanted from the musical art form into that of prose writing. The particular power of the “call and response” leitmotif is that it opens interpretative spaces facilitating resonating connections off the map of the text itself. The chasm between

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the imagined caller and the receiver of the call (Blanchot’s “space violently opened up by the context between the power to speak and the power to hear”)25 is one which is indicative of the reading process itself. Provoked by the “spatial” aspect of the leitmotif, the suspension of interpretative resolution discussed in the opening section of this essay, the text–reader paradigm is set vibrating at the moment of tension between dominant and tonic—the performative space between text and reader. Stephen experiences the effect of multiple resonances when listening to the “accents and intervals of the priest’s voice” in Chapter 4 of Portrait (P 154): “The echoes of certain expressions used in Clongowes sounded in remote caves of his mind” (P 157) and “[h]is ears were listening to these distant echoes amid the silence of the parlour” (P 157). It also occurs poignantly when Stephen listens to his siblings singing “Oft in the Stilly Night”: “He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices” (P 163) and “heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and pain” (P 164). The overtone of weariness does not resound for that moment alone but itself resonates with countless other moments of weary voices singing. Here Joyce writes out for us the very process by which we are expected to engage with his texts: it is not enough to read the words as written directly on the page but rather to hear in their overtones the echoes of that which has gone before or is to come. This is the essence of the leitmotif, evoking a space beyond the linear and the naturalistic, shimmering with potential, but postponed, temporal and spatial reconciliations. The “call and response” leitmotif is one of the most important repeated ideas because it represents in its own content its action or technique. Individual moments of calling themselves call to each other, and the subject of the leitmotif echoes its technical function, its stylistic techniques. The leitmotif provokes an outward and inward movement in the reader’s momentum between the known and the unknown, and the sense within the text that we are always returning to not the same, but the “seim anew” (FW 215.23). The very idea of a call and response is a representation of the dynamics between the text and the reader. The distance created, the space, is also indicative of the “remove” at which we encounter language and literature. That the call from afar should be answered with “Coming, far!” suggests that it is not the call which is “afar,” but us. It is the reader who must make the homecoming journey. NOTES 1. Clive Hart notes that the term was “coined by Hans von Wolzogen for specific application to the music of Wagner.” Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 164. 2. Timothy Martin, “Introduction: Operatic Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 38:1–2 (Fall 2000–Winter 2001), 32. 3. Hart, Structure and Motif, 164. 4. Martin, “Introduction,” 31; my emphasis.

190 Katherine O’Callaghan 5. David Herman, “‘Sirens’ after Schönberg,” James Joyce Quarterly 31:4 (Summer 1994), 485. 6. To use the term which Stephen Dedalus ponders on in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, taken by Joyce from Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). 7. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1983), 231–232. 8. Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Melopoiesis: Approaches to the Study of Literature and Music (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 139. 9. Barricelli, Melopoiesis, 7. 10. Richard Ellmann recounts that Joyce produced this “French equivalent” for Cadic, his French professor at university, who reacted to such wordplay with delight: “‘[f]or that I will give you my daughter.’” Ellmann writes that it “is a term that usefully describes the way in which a concept like river in Joyce’s writing will serve to mother a whole chapter of river names and themes all done in rivery prose” (JJII 60). 11. Barricelli, Melopoiesis, 135. 12. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 37. 13. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts,” The Sewanee Review 53.2 (Spring 1945), 225. 14. Frank, “Spatial Form,” 225, 230. 15. The feeling of nostos is like a signpost for listeners indicating that a piece of music is in its fi nal section, as depicted in “The Dead”: “[Gabriel] knew that Mary Jane must be near the end of her piece for she was playing again the opening melody with runs of scales after every bar and while he waited for the end the resentment died down in his heart” (D 187). 16. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (Middlesex: Penguin, 1952), 225. 17. John Paul Riquelme has pointed out that the words “fall” and “swoon” tend to occur together and do so at the ends of Parts I, II, and IV of Portrait (Riquelme, 225), as, of course, they do in “The Dead.” John Paul Riquelme, “For Whom the Snow Taps: Style and Repetition in ‘The Dead’,” in James Joyce: The Dead: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Daniel R. Schwarz (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 219–233. 18. Roland McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake” (rev. ed.) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1991). 19. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Joyce the Parisian,” in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (rev. ed.), ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49. 20. The passage describing the call is in fact surprisingly lyrical for a description of a tuning fork, which has a metallic sound which could not really be described as pure or soft. Joyce is allowing a large degree of artistic license to create a sound which contains the poignancy of Bloom’s pain through a single lonely note, as well as the sexual imagery associated with Molly and Boylan. 21. The confusion of pronouns regarding who is “playing” the tuning fork preshadows the “Siopold” chord, whereby singer, operatic character and listener are merged into one. 22. Riquelme, “For Whom the Snow Taps,” 228. 23. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Works, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 54. 24. Barricelli, Melopoiesis, 7. 25. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 37.

11 The Thomistic Representation of Dublin in Ulysses Sam Slote

In this chapter, I will be travelling down a well-worn road, the 1904 Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses. Although well worn, this particular Dublin does not, in point of fact exist, at least not in any conventional comportment of factual existence. Frank Budgen records one of Joyce’s most famous boasts concerning Ulysses: “I want . . . to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”1 It should be noted that Joyce’s boast was, in all likelihood, made after the Easter Rising of 1916 when large parts of Dublin were, in point of fact, destroyed.2 In any case, his boast is still not, in point of fact, literally true. But then, what might it mean for such a claim to be in point of fact literally true? Budgen himself did not take Joyce’s boast at face value as he notes that a certain narrative minimalism obscures a precise rendering of urban detail. He writes, “Houses and interiors are shown us, but as if we entered them as familiars, not as strangers.”3 And so, instead of description, Dublin is conveyed or evoked as the ineluctable background to Ulysses. A famous example of this is when Joyce asked his aunt Josephine, in a letter from November 1921, if “an ordinary person [could] climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles Street” (Letters I 175). It is not known what, or even if, aunt Josephine replied to this question about the railings of 7 Eccles Street (some of her responses to Joyce’s other questions about the minutiae of Dublin topography are held at Cornell but these answers lack the precision that Joyce requests). In 1909 Joyce had seen his friend J. F. Byrne, then resident at that address, execute such a maneuver, but Byrne was of an athletic build and Joyce needed to know if someone less fit could also do it in order to determine the wording for U 17.84–99.4 The facticity of the railings at 7 Eccles Street is thus indirectly present in Ulysses, apparently much like the other purported facticities of the Augustan city. The details out of which Dublin is formed informs Ulysses without being explicitly stated. The Dublin of Ulysses is thus not mimetic but rather the background to mimesis; in other words, in Ulysses Dublin is hypomimetic. In at least one sense, recreating Dublin out of Ulysses is as possible as recreating Ulysses out of Budgen’s book, which is to say that neither task is really possible at all.

192 Sam Slote There are, of course, significant gaps in the urban landscape of Dublin as presented in Ulysses. Much, if not most, of the city is not actually represented in Joyce’s novel. Joyce largely avoids the tonier neighborhoods of the Hibernian capital and no action takes place in or by St. Stephen’s Green, which is only mentioned once in the text in an aside (U 17.145– 146). Indeed, parts of Dublin that had appeared in Joyce’s earlier works are largely absent in Ulysses. Trinity College is one of the few exceptions to this as it appears in Dubliners, A Portrait, Ulysses, as well as Finnegans Wake.5 It is as if Joyce in Ulysses blacks out the Dublin that he had previously represented; although, certainly, Dubliners from the earlier texts do reappear in Ulysses. Therefore, Joyce’s earlier texts mediate the representation of Dublin in Ulysses. As Bloom thinks while walking in “Lestrygonians,” the cityscape changes and mutates as one moves along: “Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on” (U 8.484–485). The Dublins of Dubliners and A Portrait have each passed away, to be replaced by the Dublin of Ulysses, just as that Dublin covers over and mediates the Dublin of 1904. I will be focusing on another type of textual mediation. In composing Ulysses, Joyce relied extensively on the mammoth civil cyclopedia Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, published annually by Alexander Thom & Co., who had offices at 87–89 Abbey Street Middle, next but one to the offices of Freeman’s Journal, where Bloom works.6 As Clive Hart writes, The Dublin which Joyce recreates is the Dublin of physical reality, remembered and coloured by his own atypical personality, but it is also the Dublin that one may fi nd enshrined, embalmed in the pages of Thom’s—the official, statistical Dublin, the city reduced to objective memory, to street lists, tradesman’s catalogues, census counts.7 In his obituary of Joyce for the Irish Times, Constantine Curran claimed that “Joyce was many things, but he was certainly the last forty volumes of Thom’s Directory thinking aloud.”8 There is thus some irony that the street in Dublin currently named after Joyce had previously been named “Corporation Street,” after the Dublin Corporation, the municipal governing body. Quite literally, Joyce has supplanted the local city authority in the city’s topographic nomenclature.9 In the brief preface to Thom’s, the editors state that they hope to provide “a ready book of reference on almost all subjects of public interest” (T1904 iv). Both Thom’s and Ulysses aim toward the comprehensive and the commodious. Indeed, in a review of Ulysses when it was first published, George Slocombe called it “as large as a telephone directory or a family bible, and with many of the literary and social characteristics of each!”10 And so, the well-worn road I will be travelling today is the copy of the 1904 Thom’s at the National Library of Ireland, a volume battered by a half-century’s worth of Joyceans.11

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Dublin is thus represented in Ulysses by proxy through Thom’s. The directory serves as a source text, in some ways like the anthologies of English literature Joyce culled for his exercise of styles in “Oxen of the Sun.” Just as Joyce mimed the styles of his literary predecessors in that episode, he seemingly imitates the presumed civil exactitude of Thom’s throughout Ulysses. For example, almost all the data Joyce supplies in “Ithaca” to denote the year 1904 derives, virtually verbatim, from the fi rst page of Thom’s: “the bissextile year one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era (jewish era five thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indiction 2, Julian period 6617, MCMIV” (U 17.95–99). Thom’s reads, “Thom’s / Official Directory / of the / United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, / For the Year 1904, / Being Bissextile, or Leap Year. / Chronological Cycles 1904. / Golden Number, 5. — Epact, 13. — Solar Cycle, 9. — Dominical Letters CB. — Roman Indiction, 2. — Julian Period, 6617. / . . . / Jewish and Mahometan Eras. / The year 5565 of the Jewish Era commences on September 10, 1904. Ramadân (month of abstinence observed by the Turks) commences on November 9, 1904. The year 1322 of the Mahometan Era commences on March 18, 1904” (T1904 1). The only fact in the “Ithaca” passage not present on the fi rst page of Thom’s is the Roman numeral for 1904, which Joyce, in fact, got wrong as he put in the meaningless MXMIV, which is how this passage read in the fi rst edition (U1922 622.04)12 —an error that was expunged in Gabler’s edition. While the Roman numeral for 1904 does not appear on the fi rst page of Thom’s, it does appear on the title page as MDCCCCIV (T1904 i), an alternate form for that year. Another error that Joyce made in this passage, which Gabler subsequently corrected, is the phrase “Roman indication” (U1922 622.04) in place of “Roman indiction,” which designates the fi fteen-year cycle instituted by the Emperor Constantine in 313 AD for purposes of taxation. 1904 was the second year of this cycle and therefore its Roman indiction is 2.13 Perhaps Joyce deliberately uses the word “indication” to indicate the sort of mistake someone, such as Bloom, might make when confronted with the atypical word “indiction.” Indeed, in his Dictionary of Received Ideas, Flaubert glosses “Epact, Golden Number, Dominical Letter” with the lessthan-helpful explanation: “On all calendars; no-one knows what these are.”14 However, since Joyce added all this calendric information on one of the last sets of proof pages for Ulysses, dated January 25, 1922 (JJA 27 140), and did not have time to review them before publication, perhaps the error is simply an unintentional gaffe. Assuming this to be the case, Gabler emended the date to MCMIV and “indication” to the correct form “indiction” (U 17.98–99; U-G 1752). The presence of errors of fact is of course a significant interpretive and editorial problem with Ulysses and in particular with “Ithaca.” Clearly Joyce used Thom’s but his purposes in Ulysses are not limited to accurate civil exactitude. On the level of style, Joyce mines and mimes, sometimes imperfectly, Thom’s comprehensiveness.

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In some senses, it might be a more sane endeavor to recreate 1904 Dublin from the pages of Thom’s rather than from Ulysses itself. However, this would also be problematic since Thom’s is, in its own way, an idiosyncratic and imperfect guide to Dublin. It contains numerous errors, some of which Joyce, perhaps inadvertently, inherited as he culled its pages for the topographic phenomena and epiphenomena of Dublin life. These errors testify to the mediating presence of Thom’s as a proxy for Dublin and thus, by extension, they also testify to the absence of Dublin in Ulysses. The Dublin Joyce presents is thus an already textualized city, an urban landscape imperfectly mediated. If one needs to already know Dublin in order to read Ulysses, as Budgen proposes, then one also needs to know how Dublin was already represented and misrepresented in Thom’s.15 (Joyce also relied on a variety of newspapers to provide details of 1904 Dublin, but my primary focus is his use of Thom’s.) Since an edition of Thom’s reflects information that was accurate as of late October the previous year, Joyce would have been better off relying on the 1905 edition of Thom’s for Ulysses rather than the 1904.16 For example, although Joyce chose 7 Eccles Street as Bloom’s address because his friend J. F. Byrne lived there in 1909,17 the fact that the 1904 Thom’s listed that property as vacant (T1904 1482) might have made it a more attractive option for Joyce since he could then insert his fictional character into an otherwise then-unoccupied house.18 However, the 1905 Thom’s lists a W. Finneran as the occupant of 7 Eccles Street (T1905 1528), and thus he could well have been living there on 16 June 1904.19 If the publisher’s note in the fi rst edition of Ulysses acknowledges the inevitability of error considering “the exceptional circumstances” in which it was produced (U1922 xi), 20 then the editors of Thom’s are somewhat less forthcoming about the mistakes that have infected their “authentic statistical information” (T1904 iv). The editors of Thom’s thus presume that error is absent from their work, but perhaps no work can pretend to be comprehensive unless it also includes error. The inclusion of error is, perhaps, essential to the representation of urban landscape in Ulysses. The inclusion of Thom’s-derived error in Ulysses parallels Pound’s fi rst canto, the bulk of which is an English translation of Andreas Divus’s sixteenth-century Latin translation of a portion of Book 11 of The Odyssey. Pound notably retains an error in Divus’s translation: “Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke fi rst: / ‘A second time? why? man of ill star, / Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?”21 In place of the Greek word diogenès (“sprung from Zeus”), the text Divus relied upon incorrectly had dígonos (“twice-born” or “double”). 22 In Pound’s canto Divus’s mistake is repeated, or in other words, is itself dígonos. This repetition suggests that the Odyssey that Pound has inherited is not Homer’s, but rather one that has been meditated throughout the centuries, an odyssey that is always mistakenly “born again.” The repetition of Divus’s mistake thus indicates the unwieldy phalanx of Odysseuses that stand in between Pound

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and Homer.23 And so, as with Pound’s odyssey, Joyce’s Dublin is plural and errant. Other Dublins stand in-between the Hibernian metropolis and Ulysses. Bloom himself worked at Thom’s. From information given within Ulysses, the specific date of his tenure there is ambiguous as Bloom is notoriously unreliable in precisely remembering exact details of his past. However, on a chronology of Bloom’s life that Joyce prepared in a notebook, he indicates that Bloom worked there in 1886, which is the year of the edition of Thom’s that sits on the bookshelf at Eccles Street (U 17.1362). 24 As perhaps Joyce’s hommage to Thom’s imperfect mediation, in “Nausicaa” Bloom recalls an error that had crept into an edition during his tenure there: “Remember about the mistake in the valuation when I was in Thom’s. Twentyeight it is” (U 13.1125–1126). However, Joyce is imputing a mistake that Thom’s did not, in fact, make, since the 1886 edition lists the valuation of each of the two rectories adjoining St. Mary Star of the Sea Church (numbers 3 and 5 Leahy Terrace) as £28 (T1886 1618), which is exactly the same value as given in the 1904 edition (T1904 1781), as well as in all the others in between.25 So here Joyce misrepresents Thom’s infidelity, or lack thereof. However, Thom’s does make mistakes, an example of which that Joyce inherited is the address of the City Arms Hotel, where the Blooms lived from 1893 to 1894. In “Ithaca” its address is given as 54 Prussia Street. This is the address listed in both the street directory and the trades directory of the 1904 Thom’s (T1904 1574, 2069). However, in the list of Nobility, Gentry, Merchants, and Traders the address is given as 55 Prussia Street (T1904 1831, 1975), which is how it appears in other editions and, more importantly, where it actually was. (It’s not uncommon to fi nd discrepancies between the various lists in any given edition of Thom’s.) 54 Prussia Street was in fact part of the Cattle Market, which is where Bloom was working at that time.26 Clearly this mistake derives from an erroneous source; however it is apposite within the context of Ulysses precisely because Bloom frequently misremembers details of his past. There are quite a few other examples of this category of error: the reproduction of mistaken addresses from Thom’s. Besides errors of address, Thom’s contains errors of names. In “Calypso,” Bloom thinks about when he and Molly lived on Lombard Street West, in the Jewish district of Dublin. One of the neighbors he recalls is “Mastiansky with the old cither” (U 4.205–206). The 1904 Thom’s lists a P. Mastiansky at 16 St Kevin’s Parade (T1904 1589), which is around the corner from Lombard Street West. However, Louis Hyman has uncovered that this is a misprint for P. Masliansky “who in 1896 lived at 2 Martin Street, in 1899–1900 at 63 Lombard Street West and from 1901–1906 at 16 St Kevin’s Parade.”27 The erroneous source thus yields an erroneous neighbor for the fictitious Bloom. Additional errors in the representation of Dublin in Ulysses are caused by Joyce misreading Thom’s. For example, in “Ithaca,” the address of Davy

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Byrne’s pub is given as “14 Duke Street” (U 17.330), when it can actually be found at number 21. In 1904, 14 Duke Street was the address of Ellen Temple, fruiterer and greengrocer. Since both establishments appear on the same page of Thom’s street directory and both are the second items in their respective subsections (T1904 1480), Joyce may have simply made an error in transcription. 28 In several cases Joyce relied on the street directory to provide the address of the building on the corner of a particular street. However, in some cases, the last address listed before a street intersection is not actually the one on the corner. For example, in “Lestrygonians,” “Mr Bloom turned at Gray’s confectioner’s window of unbought tarts” (U 8.1069). While Katherine Gray’s confectionary shop at 13 Duke Street is the last address on Duke Street given before the junction with Dawson Street (T1904 1480), the corner was actually occupied by a pub with the address of 51C Dawson Street. 29 In effect, Joyce mistraversed the columns of Thom’s while determining the trajectory Bloom would take traversing the streets of Dublin. This is the kind of error that comes from relying upon a mediating textual fi lter. On the other hand, there are some errors in Ulysses that could have been rectified by consulting Thom’s. The fact that such easily avoidable errors exist suggests that Joyce deliberately decided to incorporate an erroneous reference. For example, in “Lestrygonians” Bloom sees a parade of sandwichboardmen advertising for Hely’s, a Dublin stationers, printer, and bookbinder, where he worked when he fi rst met Molly. He does not explicitly recall that he was fi red from this job, information which is only supplied to us by Molly in her monologue, although the reason for his dismissal is not given (U 18.561). But, he does think of this establishment’s address: “85 Dame Street” (U 8.142); however in “Ithaca” a different address is given: “89, 90, and 91 Dame Street” (U 17.1785). Perhaps unsurprisingly, both addresses are incorrect and, furthermore, impossible since, according to Thom’s, Dame Street stopped at number 82 (T1904 1470) and Hely’s correct address is 27–30 Dame Street (T1904 1468). This is a curious error for Bloom to make since presumably he would know the correct address of a place where he worked (but then, maybe that’s why he was fi red). And it is also a curious mistake for Joyce to make since it is so easy to avoid. Clive Hart speculates that “Joyce allowed Hely’s shop to wander just as Hely’s sandwichboardmen wander about the streets.”30 Hely’s thus becomes errant in both senses of the word, wandering and wrong. Hart’s reading is quite clever, or even too clever by half, but it doesn’t really do anything to dispel the possibility that Joyce made a mistake. Another possible rationale for the incorrect address in “Lestrygonians” is that since Bloom worked at Hely’s when he first met Molly, his remembering an incorrect address could serve as an indication that his other memories of that time (memories whose veracity cannot be confirmed or denied so easily) are also potentially off. However, these interpretive gestures could simply be examples of cunning hermeneutic overcompensation and are not

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fundamentally different from Danis Rose’s normalizing editorial intervention, which is to supply the correct address in both instances. 31 Rose almost invariably “corrects” the text of Ulysses to conform with documentary fact as if Ulysses were itself supposed to be a wholly accurate directory. In any case, Hart’s reading of the errant Hely’s allegorizes Joyce’s potential blunder into some higher artistic scheme, not unlike Stephen’s discussion in the NLI about Shakespeare’s mistakes, such as the infamous Bohemian coastline in The Winter’s Tale, which itself possibly derived from Shakespeare’s reliance upon a faulty source-text (U 9.226–229; 9.993–1019). 32 Ultimately, both Rose’s editorial and Hart’s interpretive interventions depend upon a knowledge of what is a topographic fact. Where Hart differs from Rose is in the response to the duly identified error: Hart interprets what is on the page (or, rather, archive of manuscript pages), whereas Rose intervenes to change what is on the page, but, nonetheless, both Hart and Rose identify and respond to a deviation from the historical topographic record and, in this, both offer normalizing readings. While each reading imposes a different mode of perfectibility upon the text, one interpretive, the other editorial, both do posit a kind of perfectibility. The Hely’s sandwichboardmen also provide Hart with a possible solution to one of the more vexing questions of Ulysses. Hart notes that at one point in “Lestrygonians” the Y in Hely’s is seen lagging behind the others munching bread (U 8.126–27). Hart thus connects him to the infamous man in the macintosh, who is seen eating bread in “Wandering Rocks” (U 10.1272) and whose bread-eating habits in general have earned him the sobriquet “Bartle the Bread” (U 14.1550). Hart notes that topographically there is no impediment to these two peripatetic characters being one and the same. 33 However, one complication is that during the vice-regal parade in “Wandering Rocks,” the carriage passes by the Hely’s sandwichboardmen at Ponsonby’s Corner, in front of Trinity College (U 10.1236) and then later the man in the macintosh crosses the carriage’s path on Lower Mount Street (U 10.1271). Unless he walked at a pace at least equal to the carriage’s, the man in the macintosh cannot be the Y from Hely’s. There are, however, still reasons to endorse this connection. Whoever the man in the macintosh may or may not be on a realistic level (and there have been numerous suggestions over the years34), he remains an overdetermined figure. For Bloom, at the end of the day, he is a “selfi nvolved enigma” (U 17.2063). Indeed, during his appearance in “Circe,” he acts as a kind of accusatory mirror to Bloom, whom he calls “Leopold M‘Intosh” (U 15.1561). Now, in “Hades,” shortly before the fi rst appearance of the man in the macintosh, Menton asks Lambert if Bloom is “in the stationery line” (U 6.700), to which Lambert replies, “Yes, he was . . . in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper” (U 6.703). Such a description is also perfectly apposite to the Y in Hely’s and thus also to the man in the macintosh if Hart’s conjecture is accepted. In this way, Bloom and macintosh are synonymous and macintosh’s “actual” identity

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as “a traveller for blottingpaper” feeds into his symbolic rôle as a “selfi nvolved enigma” for Bloom. Of course, neither Bloom nor macintosh are in the “stationery line” as they both move and circulate throughout Dublin. And, of course, resolving the identity of macintosh in this (relatively superficial) way does nothing to really establish who this person is: like Bloom he is a textual wanderer. Returning to Thom’s, a simpler type of deviation from documentary record can be found in “Sirens.” The name of the cabdriver who takes Boylan to his assignation with Molly is “Barton James of number one Harmony avenue, Donnybrook” (U 11.878–879). Thom’s reveals that a James Barton lived at Rose Cottage on Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook (T1904 1679), but he is not cited in the list of Carriage, Cab and Car Proprietors (T1904 2054); and at this time a cab driver would have almost certainly been a proprietor of his vehicle. Evidently Joyce chose this person because of the resonance of his address with the musical theme of this episode rather than because of any parallel to historical fact. One curious departure of the Dublin of Ulysses from 1904 Dublin is the thrice-mentioned drought (U 4.43–44; 14.475; 17.171). According to the 1905 Thom’s the total rainfall from Dublin in 1904 was twenty-five inches, just three inches below average. Rainfall in May was above average and only slightly below average in June (T1905 797). I have found no documentary evidence from 1904 that indicates drought as a contemporary concern. For whatever reason, in its aridity Joyce’s Dublin is not quite sultry Dublin. Similarly, Joyce transposed the foot-and-mouth epidemic that struck Ireland in 1912 to 1904, a year in which no significant outbreaks were reported.35 In some cases Joyce inherits an error from Thom’s that gets compounded during the chaotic course of the composition of Ulysses. For example, the butcher Bloom visits in “Circe” is properly called Olhausen. His name is correctly spelled in the 1904 Thom’s list of Nobility, Gentry, Merchants, and Traders (T1904 1977), but in the street directory it is incorrectly given as Olhansen (T1904 1605). On the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce appears to have followed the incorrect form from the street directory, however given Joyce’s handwriting it is not always possible to distinguish an n from a u, and so it is possible that Joyce copied the correct version.36 Joyce tends to have preferred consulting the street directory when culling Thom’s for data and so I would suggest that it is more likely that he copied the incorrect form of the name, but his uneven handwriting obscures the possible orthographical error. In any case, the typist inferred a u, thereby, possibly, incorrectly transcribing Joyce but, inadvertently, supplying the correct letter of this chap’s name. However, the typist also introduced a new error by misreading the a as an o, and so the name appears on the typescript as Olhousen.37 Things get more complicated on the placards (galley proofs), where, on one set, the typesetter further compounded the typist’s error by spelling the name Olhonsen, keeping the o and reintroducing the n. While

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reviewing these placards, Joyce corrected the n but ignored the spurious o, thereby reverting the spelling to Olhousen (JJA 20 8), which is how it had fi rst appeared on the typescript and how it subsequently appeared in the fi rst edition (U1922 413.10).38 So, the draft archive of this one word, in sequence, reproduces Thom’s error, then rectifies it, but in so doing introduces another error, then reintroduces the original error for a while only to expunge it yet again, all the while retaining the second error. Error thus has a life of its own. And so we have several different types of topographic error in Ulysses: the errors Joyce replicates from Thom’s, that is, errors that most likely wouldn’t be present in Ulysses if the 1904 Thom’s had been more accurate; then we have errors derived from Joyce misusing Thom’s, such as errors arising from mistranscription or errors derived from relying on a textually mediated representation of Dublin; then we would have errors that have infected the text over the course of its draft transmission (such errors are, of course, commonplace and perhaps unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances of Ulysses’s publication39); and fi nally we have errors that appear to be deliberate instances of Joyce contravening information readily gleaned from Thom’s for his own artistic purposes. Such a typology is, of course, far from absolute and the distinction between these categories is far from ironclad. We still don’t know quite what to do with Joycean error. The mediated “Thomistic” comportment to the representation of Dublin in Ulysses has broader implications for the nature of mimesis in Joyce’s novel. Put simply, mimesis in Ulysses is Aristotelian rather than Platonic. For Plato, mimesis works as a copy or imitation, the mirror to nature as it were. In the Poetics, Aristotle takes a different path: he defines representation as a process rather than simply a product; it is an act of imitating rather than an imitation as such. For Aristotle, imitation is a means (“tropos”)40 and is thus conditioned by the contingencies and characteristics of the chosen mode (whether painting, music, or linguistic). In this way, representation, the act of representation, is inherently characterized by interpretation and, thus, by mediation. Precisely because the forms of representation are multiple according to Aristotle’s Poetics, mimesis is always already potentially erroneous. For Aristotle, formal considerations, rather than a fidelity to facticity, occasion and condition mimesis. The mirror to nature is thus always already a conditioning medium, the “cracked lookingglass of a servant” as Stephen puts it in “Telemachus,” slyly misrepresenting Cyril’s line from Wilde’s “Decay of Lying.”41 In this way, Joyce is not simply presenting or re-presenting the historical Dublin of 1904 or the Dublin of Thom’s 1904 directory (or other sundry records, municipal or otherwise), but rather he is conditioning Dublin, at least in part, as a civil compendium, and one that is always already susceptible to error, which makes it thus, in point of fact, actually much like the Dublin of Thom’s often fallacious directory. Joyce’s Dublin is the dissimulation of Dublin and its denizens:

200 Sam Slote the Dublin in point of fact where “the point was the least conspicuous point about it” (U 16.819–820), the Dublin of representation (and thus error) and not the Hibernian city of facticity. In other words, even if there were no specific errors of fact in Joyce’s representation of Dublin, such as the ones I have here noted, the representation of Dublin in Ulysses would still be ineluctably errant.42 NOTES 1. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 69. 2. See also Enda Duffy, “Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Space,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–57, 45–46. 3. Budgen, James Joyce, 69. 4. See also J. F. Byrne, Silent Years (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1953), 157. 5. D 53, 209; P 180; U 7.801 et passim. 6. I will cite from editions of Thom’s as T+year. 7. Ian Gunn and Clive Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 15. 8. The Irish Times (14 January 1941): 4; cited in Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 15. 9. The Corporation was renamed the Dublin City Council in 2002, which freed the street to be renamed preparatory to the Bloomsday centenary. A further irony is that this street used to be called Mabbot Street and was renamed in 1925 as part of the cleaning up of nighttown. 10. George Slocombe, “The Week in Paris,” Daily Herald (London: 17 March 1922, 4); reprinted in Robert H. Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), vol. 1, 217. 11. Richard M. Kain was the fi rst Joycean to read Ulysses through Thom’s and other contemporaneous Dublin sources, (Richard M. Kain, Fabulous Voyager, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). Although not in Dublin while preparing this book, he was aided considerably by Joseph Hanna of the Trinity College library. Following Kain, Robert Martin Adams wrote a detailed analysis of Ulysses in terms of how Joyce handles documentary details, (Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). The major work in terms of Joyce’s use of Thom’s is Clive Hart and Leo Knuth’s A Topographical Guide to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (rev. ed., Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press, 1976); Gunn and Hart’s James Joyce’s Dublin is an updated version of this work. 12. I will use the siglum U1922 to cite from the fi rst edition of Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922). 13. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated (2nd ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 568. 14. “Sur les calendriers, on ne sait pas ce que c’est.” Gustave Flaubert, “Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues,” Œuvres II, ed. A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 1008. My translation. 15. Bernard Benstock provided a counter-argument by claiming, “Too much familiarity with Joyce’s Dublin might indeed be dangerous in attempting a balanced reading of Ulysses.” Bernard Benstock “Ulysses Without Dublin,” JJQ 10.1 (Fall 1972), 101.

The Thomistic Representation of Dublin in Ulysses 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

201

Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 16. See Byrne, Silent Years, 153–171. Kain, Fabulous Voyager, 122–123. Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 16. While this statement is initialed by Sylvia Beach, it was in fact written by Joyce. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1975), 4. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to “The Cantos” of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 2. Hugh Kenner calls this canto “a second derivative, a function of a function, an inspection of what is happening derived from its way of happening.” Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 149. This notebook is part of the holdings of the National Library of Ireland, its accession number is 36,639/5B; the chronology of Bloom’s life is on folio 20. An amanuensis copy of this chronology can be found in Finnegans Wake notebook Buffalo VI.C.7: 227–228. Joyce made one other chronology of Bloom’s life that is extant, but this was prepared earlier and does not indicate Bloom’s tenure at Thom’s (Buffalo V.A.8: f.c.v.). Concerning the ambiguity of determining the dates of Bloom’s tenure at Thom’s, John Henry Raleigh writes: “The most puzzling date to pin down is when Bloom worked for Thom’s. My surmises are 1886 or 1888 or 1892–93–94 or sometime previous to June 16, 1904.” (The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 275). Clive Hart, on the other hand, sees no ambiguity and—following from Bloom’s thought in “Lestrygonians” that he had worked at Thom’s during the time he lived at Lombard Street West (U 8.157)—assigns 1894–1895 as the date of his tenure there (Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 19). T1882 1594; T1887 1622; T1888 1627; T1894 1647; T1895 1657; T1896 1662; T1898 1673; T1906 1840. See also Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 104. Louis Hyman, The Jews of Ireland to the Year 1910 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1972), 189 and 329 fn.10. In “Circe,” his initial is given as “P. Mastiansky” (U 15.3223), thereby according with Thom’s and Hyman. However, in “Ithaca” a “Julius (Juda) Mastiansky” is twice mentioned (U 17.58 and 17.2134). This discrepancy is ambiguous. In “Penelope,” Molly remembers some intimate details of her neighbour Mrs Mastiansky and her husband (U 18.417–418). Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 102. Ellen Temple’s establishment is the second address listed on Duke Street after the junction with Dawson Street and Davy Byrne’s is the second address after the Duke Lane Upper junction, in the column below (T1904 1480). Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 11. Gunn and Hart list two other examples of corner confusion. Also in “Lestrygonians”: “From Butler’s monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor’s walk” (U 8.27–28). Butler’s, at number 34, is the last house listed on Bachelor’s Walk before the junction with O’Connell Street (T1904 1421), however the corner is occupied by 56 Lower O’Connell Street (Hart 2004, 102). Additionally, in “Wandering Rocks,” “A onelegged sailor crutched himself round MacConnell’s corner” (U 10.228). Thom’s lists pharmacist Andrew MacConnell’s shop at 112 Dorset Street Lower, the last address before the junction with Eccles Street (T 1904 1478). However, the corner was occupied by 1 Eccles Street (Gunn and Hart, 117). Such a mistake is entirely consistent with the topographic dissimulation endemic to this episode’s style.

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30. Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 112. 31. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Danis Rose (London: Picador, 1997), 147 and 631. 32. The source-text for the plot of The Winter’s Tale, Robert Greene’s Pandosto, places Bohemia on the seacoast. Gifford and Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, 248. See also Tim Conley’s incisive analysis of hermeneutic responses to error: Joyces Mistakes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 33. Gunn and Hart, James Joyce’s Dublin, 78–79. 34. In 1959, John Lyons and John Henry Raleigh independently arrived at the conclusion that the man in the macintosh is none other than Mr. Duffy from “A Painful Case” (John O. Lyons, “The Man in the Macintosh,” in A James Joyce Miscellany, Second Series, ed. Marvin Magalanar (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959, 133–138; John Henry Raleigh, “Who Was M’Intosh?,” James Joyce Review 3.1–2 [1959]: 59–62). This suggestion is not without problems but has some potential and is not incompatible with Hart’s suggestion that macintosh is the Y from Hely’s. Nabokov’s suggestion that the man in the macintosh is Joyce himself seems to be more a reflection of Nabokov’s æsthetic than Joyce’s, thereby making macintosh a “selfinvolved enigma” for Nabokov (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on “Ulysses”: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Bruccoli-Clark, 1980, n.p.). 35. In 1912 Joyce wrote an editorial on foot-and-mouth disease at the request of Henry Blackwood Price, the original for Mr Deasy (JJII 325–326). This was published, unsigned, in the Freeman’s Journal on September 10, 1912 (CW 238–241). Many of the details about this transaction are fi ltered into “Nestor.” Gifford cites the Irish Daily Independent for June 16, 1904 to show that foot-and-mouth disease was not a concern of that year: “The Irish cattle, however, continued practically immune from the more serious contagious diseases. There was no cattle plague, foot and mouth disease, pleuro pneumonia, or sheep louse in 1903” 4; Gifford and Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, 37). 36. Rosenbach “Circe”: f. 4 (James Joyce “Ulysses” A Facsimile of the Manuscript, introduction by Harry Levin, bibliographical preface by Clive Driver New York: Octagon; Philadelphia: The Philip H. & A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1975, 3 vols). 37. Buffalo V.B.13.e: f. 7. 38. Gabler uses the correct form of the name (U 15.155), but only because he construes Joyce as originally having put the correct form on the Rosenbach manuscript (U-G 936.08, TN). 39. See my book “Ulysses” in the Plural: The Variable Editions of Joyce’s Novel (Dublin: NLI, 2004). 40. Aristotle, De Arte Poetica Liber, ed. Rudolph Kassel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1447a.18. 41. “I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked looking-glass. But you don’t mean to say that you seriously believe Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror and Art the reality?” Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (5th ed.) (Glasgow: Collins, 2003), 1071– 1092, 1082. 42. I would like to thank Harald Beck, Hans Walter Gabler, Clive Hart, John O’Rourke, Gerry O’Flaherty, and Fritz Senn for suggestions and provocative comments.

12 Writing Space Daniel Ferrer

When we come to think of it, the space that was most familiar to Joyce was not the landscape of the Irish countryside or the homely space of his often relocated residence. Not even the urban space of Dublin that features so prominently in his books. No, he spent the greatest part of his days gazing at “paperspace” (FW 115.07): this phrase, which has often been used metaphorically, must be taken quite literally. The space that Joyce had before his eyes most of the day, the space he spent most time exploring, as long as he could see and sometimes even when he could not see and had to grope,1 was the space of a rectangular sheet of white paper, written on or in the process of being written on. The vast majority of his waking life was spent in front of books or manuscripts, reading or writing, reading and writing. The reader of Joyce’s works does not normally have access to this space: he does not see the books that Joyce read; he does not see his manuscripts. And yet we have reasons to think that our reading experience is somehow influenced by this space, in the same way as our waking life is influenced, according to psychoanalysis, by the “Other Scene” of the Unconscious. The relation is not one of homology: the printed pages of Joyce’s works do not reflect the spatial disposition of the manuscript pages in the way the printed text reflects, more or less faithfully the manuscript text.2 Each page of Joyce’s printed books has many antecedent manuscript pages, from the first draft to the fair copy, as well as a number of typescripts and corrected proofs, each with its own characteristic spatial disposition. There is no way that the final printed page can resemble all of these. Some of them are as neat and regular as printed pages, their layout comparable to the elegant symmetry of Georgian Dublin, but others are more like the organic chaos of a Brazilian favela, or perhaps like the labyrinthine medieval plan that underlies and secretly conditions the apparently rational urbanism of the Irish capital.

SPATIAL DYNAMICS OF TEXTUAL EXPANSION A few of Joyce’s manuscripts, such as the Ulysses “notesheets,” are arranged in multiple columns; others bear only a few stray lines, with no particular

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orientation, but the vast majority of them include a more or less rectangular block of written text, 3 a column of writing, usually parallel to the longer side of the sheet of paper. This is something they have in common with the printed pages of most books, but the difference is that the rectangle of printed text is a static presence on the page (we know that it was printed as a block), while the textual column did not come on the manuscript page as an instantaneous unit. It had to be inscribed word by word, letter by letter, stroke by stroke, and the dynamics of progress, usually from top to bottom, is perceptible in the layout.4 In the terms of Stephen in “Proteus,” the nebeneinander implies a nacheinander. The shape of the paragraphs and the parallelism of the lines often suggest the rhythm of the progression, irregular and halting in the case of a fi rst draft, smooth and easy in the case of a fair copy—indeed, it is the spatial disposition of the words, lines and paragraphs on the page that reveals, with a fair degree of certainty, whether a particular manuscript is an early draft or a fair copy. However this onward movement of writing, this progression of the textual column, is not the only dynamics that can be observed on the manuscript page. It is combined, in variable proportions, with a process of revision that applies itself, perpendicularly as it were, to the forward motion of the text in the making and induces an entirely different occupation of space. Whereas the space (or set of spaces) surrounding a printed textual block is simply a frame setting it off, a delimitation of the textual column, the marginal space of a manuscript is a field for actual or potential expansion. 5 This is particularly true for such an expansive writer as Joyce. Writers often use the top and bottom margins and even, when it exists, the right hand margin, but conventionally, the left hand margin of the page is the normal reservoir for the overflow of the central textual column. Many authors, and Joyce among them, provide a copious supplementary marginal space by writing only on the recto of folios (on the right hand pages of copybooks), reserving the verso for additions and corrections, turning it in effect into a vast extension of the left margin. It is fascinating to look at some of these pages, for instance the “Sirens” draft on folio V.A.5.14–15.6 A variety of graphic clues can be translated into temporal data: they allow us to reconstruct the chronology of the marginal inscriptions. The numerous additions accumulate in the left margin, until no vacant space is left.7 They infi ltrate the main column, squeezing themselves into the residual blanks between the paragraphs. Then they start overflowing on the facing verso, sprawling across the page at fi rst, as if enjoying the luxury of that wide open area, and then soon becoming crowded again, occupying all the remaining surfaces. Ultimately the next verso (V.A.5.16) is also used for a continuation of the additions. The relation between the basic text and the marginal material can be seen as centrifugal or centripetal. The marginal additions are like shoots growing from the stem, or tentacles reaching out. Indeed, they are often linked to their point of insertion by connecting lines that look like sunbeams:

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the text irradiates its margins. On the other hand, in so far as the marginal additions are often composed of external material intruding into the work (see the following discussion), the text is also a pin cushion, or rather a Saint Sebastian, ecstatically transfixed by a volley of arrows. But the arrows never fall at random; clearly, there is a gravitational pull from the text that guides and even initiates the supplementary material. This last image seems particularly appropriate when one considers the genetic documents of the “Eumaeus” episode: from the earliest extant draft to the last proofs, the text absorbs, like a black hole, an enormous quantity of extraneous matter that comes to clutter its syntax and increase its density beyond all proportions. In some cases the two dynamics, the forward movement of the developing text and the lateral accretive expansion, collide and have to compete for the same space. For instance, in the same “Sirens” manuscript,8 the versos are theoretically devoted to revisions, but Joyce came to the end of the copybook before the chapter was quite fi nished, so that, instead of starting a new copybook for a single page, he reversed his course and used the blank verso of the penultimate page (V.A.5–229) to complete the basic version. As a result, this single surface accommodates successive waves of textual expansion, each of a different nature and working in a different direction: fi rst the continuation (and conclusion) of the draft, then an addition to the text on the facing verso, additions to this addition, and fi nally a revision of the continuation. The hydraulic vocabulary (reservoir, overflow, infiltration, wave, etc.) that comes naturally when trying to describe this irresistible tide of textual expansion flooding over every available space points us to the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses. The episode is ostensibly about a walk on the seaside, but we know that the “art” assigned to it in the various schemas is philology, that it deals with language and its transformations, stylistic or historic, rhetorical, or etymological.10 Sandymount strand is a limen, a threshold between the land and the sea, occupied by “the lacefringe of the tide,” a transition between the solid and the liquid elements, made of shifting sands and strewn with flotsam and jetsam, in other words it is a marginal space. It is tempting to read its mobile, iridescent surface as a representation of another locus of protean transformations, the frontier between the text and its other, the margin of the manuscript.11

“FROM SPACE TO SPACE, TIME AFTER TIME, IN VARIOUS PHASES OF SCRIPTURE” (FW 254.26–27) The margin is a transitional space through which the text in progress deals with different forms of alterity: the outside world, other books, other parts of the same text, and other versions of itself. This last form of confrontation is very important. It is in the margin that the text is faced with its own

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future. Whereas the main column is usually a witness of the textual past (it is often copied out from a previous version), the marginal changes constitute the text in becoming; they are directed toward the next state. Take a page from the fi rst extant complete draft of “Proteus” (Buffalo V.A.3.1512). Halfway down the main column, we fi nd this passage: “Behold the handmaid of the moon. The wet sign rules her courses, visits her. Rise up, according to the word.” Everything after “wet sign” is deleted and replaced, between the lines and in the margin, by a new version: “calls on her and bids her rise. Bridebed childbed bed of death, ghostcandled.” We can verify that the words inscribed in the main column come from the recently discovered early draft, now at the National Library of Ireland (hereafter NLI), probably through a lost intermediate version: they are a record of the early history of the passage. We can also verify that the substituted words inscribed in the margin are integrated in the next available state, the Rosenbach fair copy (R 15, see also the fi nal version at U 3.395–396): they represent the future of the passage. The marginal transactions between past and future are sometimes much more complex. On the same page of the Buffalo “Proteus” draft, we fi nd a particularly spectacular example.13 The words “Mouth to her mouth’s kiss” originate in the earlier version: on page 8 of the NLI draft, Joyce had fi rst written “a man’s lips to her kiss” and then revised it to “mouth to her mouth’s kiss.” On the Buffalo draft (and in the final text) the hesitation is dramatized. The phrase comes fully formed to Stephen’s mind. He then considers modifying it but he deliberately restores the symmetry “Mouth to her kiss. No. You must have two of em. Glue em well together. Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.” After that, however, Stephen attempts a variation (“His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moongmbh.”), incorporating into the second term a range of echoes (moon, womb, tomb) suggested by the adjacent marginal substitution (“handmaid of the moon . . . Bridebed childbed bed of death”). But at this point, it was Joyce himself who hesitated again. He crossed out “moongmbh” and used the margin to try out, in the form of a list, a long series of permutations of the components, some of them immediately crossed out, some of them simply displayed in juxtaposition: “Moongb /Moongmbwb / moongbm / moongmb / moongbhmb / moongb / moongmbhb / moongbh / moombh.” He fi nally chose the last element of the marginal array and reimported it into the text, just after the crossed out “moongmbh,” to continue the main paragraph. It is as if a wave had deposited an object on the beach and the next one had taken it back into the sea, or rather, to reverse the image, as if an object had been thrown into the ocean, there to suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange, and then was spewed back on the shore and returned to terrestrial usage. In the Rosenbach manuscript, this element will be modified again, simplified into “moomb.” In the fi nal version, it will be replaced (perhaps by mistake) by a mere “womb.” In spite of this superficial disappearance, we

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can consider that the history of this transmutation remains present and active. Its traces can be found disseminated in the fi nal text and we can say that this womb is big with all the marginal variations that led up to it, that it incorporates the fertile space of the margin that was its matrix. The submerged portmanteau words will resurface, a few years later, in “Work in Progress,” richer and more complex than ever. But a different process of dissemination is already at work in the margin of the “Proteus” manuscript. After having inserted “moomb,” the carefully selected compound, Joyce drafted in the margin another insertion that literally unpacks the portmanteau: “Oomb, tombwombing ^+allwombing+^ tomb vowel. His mouth moulded ^+issuing+^ breath, unspeeched [ . . . ].” This is a good illustration of Roman Jakobson’s analysis of the poetic function of language as a projection of the axis of selection (or virtuality) upon the axis of combination (or actuality). The elements of the paradigm that have been piling up in a list are linearized, rearranged and projected on the syntagmatic chain of a sentence. The marginal space proves to be simultaneously a field of virtualities (the trying ground for potential variants) and a locus of actualization in the elaboration of new sequences.

MARGINAL CONNECTIONS One of the problems facing any writer is the coherence of his work. In a simple, linear text, this is hardly a problem, the natural memory of the writer and the momentum of writing are enough to ensure a reasonable degree of consistency, but within the frame of Joyce’s post-Symbolist aesthetics, the tightness of structure that he is striving to achieve, unprecedented on such a scale, is combined with a systematic interlinking of the different parts and a strong overdetermination of each element. Joseph Frank, in his famous study of spatial form, has emphasized the burden that is placed on the reader of Ulysses: [T]he reader is forced to read Ulysses . . . by continually fitting fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive reference, he can link them to their complements . . . The reader is intended to acquire this sense as he progresses through the novel, connecting allusions and references spatially and gradually becoming aware of the pattern of relationships . . . A knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of any part; but . . . such knowledge can be obtained only after the book has been read, when all the references are fitted into their proper places and grasped as a unity.14 Frank mentions Joyce’s “unbelievably laborious fragmentation of narrative structure,” but he is not interested in investigating the kind of labour that was required to provide it. Obviously, when Joyce was writing the parts of

208

Daniel Ferrer

Ulysses, he did not have that essential “knowledge of the whole” since the whole was nonexistent and could never have been anticipated in the form it fi nally took. To palliate this inevitable deficiency and generate the hypermnesia that characterizes his work,15 Joyce used different forms of “artificial memory,” and particularly, projecting his text upon the map of Dublin16 as well as upon the text of the Odyssey, “loci memoriae.”17 One of the functions of the no-man’s-land of the margin is to weave connections between different parts of the text. On the same “Proteus” manuscript page that has been occupying us, in between the marginal additions and substitutions, we fi nd the words “LB’s / letter: / headache / menstruous / (monthly).” This is suggested by Stephen’s poetical rambling about women’s periodical bleeding. At this point in the writing of Ulysses, a series of correspondences, parallelisms and antitheses between the three early Stephen episodes and the subsequent Bloom episodes are being established. Joyce notes that the romantic letter from “Martha” should contain a reference to a headache that Bloom will interpret prosaically as a menstrual migraine. Readers of “Lotus Eaters” know that the note has been effective and that the link has been created (U 5.285). On the “Sirens” draft pages mentioned earlier (V.A.5.14–15), the connection works in the opposite direction: a note in the center of the left-hand page attempts to link Bloom’s monologue to an earlier passage, Stephen’s Shakespearian musings about Gerard’s rosery of Fetter lane in “Scylla and Charybdis.” The transaction is however more difficult to complete: the passage is very difficult to integrate, the graft will not be completed at this point and it will eventually migrate to a different part of the episode (U 11.907).

TRANSITIONAL SPACE: ACCLIMATIZING THE INTERTEXT So far, we have seen how the text uses its margin to face up to different versions of itself or to reach toward different passages in the same work. We must now consider more radical forms of alterity. The marginal inscription of the outside world on the manuscript requires only a brief mention. Some writers (Stendhal, for instance) practice this extensively: they keep a kind of diary in their margins, noting down the external circumstances of writing and personal as well as historical events. It is not the case with Joyce. Michael Groden has shown that Joyce and Nora used a “Cyclops” draft for playful or angry exchanges, and that this private dialogue probably interfered in some measure with the writing and revision of the episode, but this is quite exceptional.18 It is only in the Finnegans Wake notebooks that remarks about Joyce’s personal life and material circumstances alternate freely with his literary work, to the point that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. On the other hand, the marginal inscription of other texts is a very important subject that we can only begin to discuss here.19 We know that

Writing Space

209

the “mouth to her mouth” fragment, the only piece of literature composed in Ulysses, is transcribed on the lower margin of Deasy’s letter. Stephen takes care to detach it, to sever the marginal from the main text, but nevertheless the detached slip retains the negative shape of the other piece; it is literally an indenture. Stephen by writing at the bottom of Deasy’s letter signs himself as his apprentice: his writing is conditioned by this marginal condition and he becomes, in his own eyes, the bullockbefriending bard. 20 It is easier to describe what happens in the manuscripts of Finnegans Wake because Joyce’s methods have become more systematic at this stage. 21 Most drafts are similar in spatial arrangement to the Ulysses drafts mentioned earlier. The left hand page is used as an extension of the margin and the whole of this augmented marginal space is teeming with additions, keyed to the main textual column by a series of letters or carets, and often linked to their intended place of insertion by a connecting line. The point is that a great proportion of these marginal insertions ultimately come from other texts.22 They ultimately come from external sources: that is to say that they do not land directly from the source onto the margin of the draft. It is possible and useful, however, to describe what happens in terms of extended marginal transaction. We must fi rst take in consideration the books and newspapers read by Joyce and the printed pages he had before his eyes. We know that the spatial disposition of the printed matter influenced his reading and eventually his writing. The kind of notes he takes shows that he often reads in a superficial way and that his attention is attracted by passages emphasized by the layout. 23 Joyce, however, does not generally react to what he is reading on the page of the book itself, by inscribing marginal commentaries or markings. He performs a first spatial displacement to the pages of a notebook. 24 Note-taking writers can be classified in two categories: the “marginalists” and the “extractors.”25 The marginalists write their notes in the margins of the volumes they read (like Voltaire or Coleridge), while the extractors, such as Winckelmann or Virginia Woolf, leave the books intact and write down their notes in copybooks, notesheets, common place books, spicilegia and other external containers. Joyce clearly belongs to the latter category: he didn’t own that many books (compared with the quantity of works he read and actually used in his writing) and rarely marked extensively the volumes he owned (with a few exceptions, we are not sure that the few marks his books bear were made by him). Extractors and marginalists have a different relation to the text they read. Extractors cut it up and store it, in what is supposed to be a concentrated and quintessential form but is de facto a mutilated state, in storing places that play the part of a maturing cellar or a decontamination chamber. The marginalists preserve the contextual integrity of the text, but they brand it with idiosyncratic marks, adorn it with commentaries of all kinds, embrace it with their own writing, plant the seeds of their own creation in

210 Daniel Ferrer the interstices of the text so as to feed from its substance. The difference between the two categories is important for it reflects deep-rooted attitudes—but it should not be overstated. The parasitical or vampirical aspect of the marginalists is inherent in every kind of reading note, whether it is inscribed in the margin or on a physically separate medium. The extractor’s appropriation and attack against the integrity of the work can also be generalized: the marginalists respect such integrity only superficially, for it is already an act of violence to select a passage, to mark a section, at the expense of the work’s cohesion and unity. We can think of Bloom, who toys with the idea of a literary composition in close intertextual and genetic relation to Philip Beaufoy’s “Matcham’s Masterstroke”: he tears “away half the prize story sharply” (U 4.537) and deposits a very idiosyncratic annotation on the page, claiming to be producing “a collection of prize stories of which [he is] the inventor, something that is an entirely new departure” (U 15.803–804). Philip Beaufoy, the author, understandably resents both the marking (“the hallmark of the beast,” U 15.844–845) and the appropriation. The material contiguity, the direct confrontation between the printed text and marginal notes are a visible projection of the less palpable dialogic interplay that governs the relations between texts and can be considered as the best representative of the economy of note writing (and perhaps of writing in general). This justifies that we should consider Joyce’s notebooks as extended margins (extended to the tune of 14,000 pages) not to a single book, but to a huge library. They have replaced Stephen’s favorite writing material, the library slips that he steals from the counter in Kildare street (U 3.407): like these slips, the notebooks give access to a crushing mass of accumulated texts and yet they are also the medium for the most individual creation. The Finnegans Wake notebooks have different forms and sizes, but they are mostly characterized by small dimensions, essential to their mobility. 26 Like the torn bottom of Deasy’s letter, they are severed margins, floating between the sources and the drafts. This mobility, this transitory status is even more characteristic of their content. The notes visibly float on the surface of the notebook pages: they practically never gel into paragraphs and hardly form complete sentences. 27 Even when they do not take the form of lists, they constitute a huge paradigm, ready to be injected into the syntagms of the drafts. They embody Jakobson’s axis of selection or virtuality. 28 For this reason, there is little interaction on the surface of the notebook pages, except when they are temporarily used as a draft. In their function as recipient of the reading notes and reservoir for the additions, they are purely relational. Joyce occasionally sorted out his notes on sheets or in other notebooks and when his eyesight deteriorated to the point that he had trouble reading his own hand, he asked an amanuensis to transcribe all the unused notes legibly in a fresh series of notebooks: such operations were (at least in theory) pure acts of transfer.29 Even this most neutral of manuscript spaces, however, can be considered to have left its mark on the

Writing Space

211

fi nal text. What Finnegans Wake retains from this medium through which a considerable proportion of its matter was fi ltered is precisely its character of virtuality: the words of the Wake also float on the printed page, as portmanteaus vacillating between several possible actualizations, poised between different potential forms and different potential meanings. It is difficult if not impossible to prove our working hypothesis that the published work somehow retains the memory of all the states it went through: not only the textual states (a crossed-out word remains present and continues to haunt the sentence from which it has been deleted)30 but also the disposition of the words on the page. Even those who are not ready to accept this have to acknowledge that the layout of the manuscripts cannot be neglected, among other types of historical circumstances, as a factor in the development of the work. We have privileged and generalized marginal surfaces, but we could have emphasized interlinear space with similar results. Every part of a manuscript is related to all the others and belongs to a system that must be presented analytically but should be apprehended globally. To give a proper idea of the spatial characteristics of Joyce’s manuscript, of the great variety of their sizes and dispositions, of the vibrant energy that pervades their surface, abundant illustration would be necessary. The rather abstract descriptions and the necessarily vague and sometimes contradictory comparisons that have been used in this article cannot make up for this absence, but it is hoped that they will be sufficiently suggestive to encourage the reader to refer to the existing reproductions in the James Joyce Archive, the Rosenbach facsimiles, and the edition of the Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, and if possible to consult the original manuscripts, so as to get personally acquainted with those magic surfaces which hold in store more wonders than the Mirus Bazaar, more awe than the Clongowes square ditch and Father Conmee’s study combined, more excitement than Mrs. Cohen’s establishment and much more fecundity than the Porter’s bedroom. NOTES 1. “I composed some wondrous devices for /\d during the night and wrote them out in the dark very carefully only to discover that I had made a mosaic on top of other notes so I am now going to bring my astronomical telescope into play” (Letters I 235). 2. It is true that the typographical peculiarities of some printed chapters, for instance “Circe” in Ulysses or “The Lessons” in Finnegans Wake, can be traced to the genetic documents: we are usually able to determine the point at which the idea of the layout occurred or the decision to adopt it was taken. This occurs very early in the case of “Circe”: in the fi rst extant draft (Buffalo V.A.19) we see the narrative being transformed, after two and a half pages, into stage directions. In coherence with this, the speeches of the characters immediately assume a theatrical disposition, with the name of the speaker appearing before them underlined and centered on the page. In the case of “The Lessons” (Finnegans Wake II.2) on the contrary, the marginal anno-

212 Daniel Ferrer

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

tations that give it its visual identity appear rather late in the history of the chapter. Actually, they are often trapezoidal, since the margin widens toward the bottom and the text block consequently narrows. Sometimes, however, a blank is left, destined to be fi lled later. For a description of the very complex progression of the fi rst draft of Finnegans Wake III.3, see David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 37–39. Now online at http://digicoll.library. wisc.edu/cgi-bin/JoyceColl/JoyceColl-idx?type=turn&entity=JoyceColl. HaymanFirstDrft.p0049&id=JoyceColl.HaymanFirstDrft&isize=M. See Jacques Neefs, “Margins,” trans. Stephen A. Noble, Word & Image 13:2 (1997), 135–157. I have discussed the layout of these pages in “‘Practise Preaching’: variantes pragmatiques et prédication suspendue dans un manuscrit des ‘Sirènes’,” in Writing its own wrunes for ever, Essais de génétique joycenne/ Essays in Joycean Genetics, ed. D. Ferrer and C. Jacquet (Tusson, Éditions du Lérot, 1998, 11–43) and “The Open Space of the Draft Page: James Joyce and Modern Manuscripts,” in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (University of Michigan Press, 1998), 249–267. Both these studies include a reproduction of the manuscripts. See also JJA 13:46–47. Some of the marginal inscriptions are technically substitutions rather than additions, but they usually consist in several lines replacing one or two words crossed out in the main text and fully contribute to the expansive propensity of writing. Buffalo V.A.5, the second part of the second draft of “Sirens.” This draft is an example of Joyce’s inconsistent writing habits. It is written on two copybooks. The one containing the fi rst part (now in the National Library of Ireland) is written on rectos and versos continuously while the second (in the Buffalo collection) is written on rectos only. Joyce numbered it “33,” in sequence with “32,” the facing verso. In “Epiphanic ‘Proteus’,” Genetic Joyce Studies 5 (Spring 2005), http://www. geneticjoycestudies.org/), Sam Slote shows that the identification between the shifting sands and language was reinforced when Joyce redrafted the passage. When Bloom in his turn walks on the same strand in the “Nausicaa” episode, he sees it as a writing space, surrounded by “lines and scars and letters,” and proceeds to write a fragment on its surface, as a kind of marginal response to Martha’s letter (U 13.1256–1266). JJA 12:253. See also Daniel Ferrer and Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Paragraphs in expansion,” trans. Jed Deppman, in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, ed. J. Deppman, D. Ferrer, and M. Groden (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004), 132–151. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) in The Idea of Spatial Form (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 20–21. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce: He War,” trans. Geoff Bennington, in Poststructuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 147. Frank writes that “Joyces assumes—what is obviously not true—that all his readers are Dubliners” (20). Being a Dubliner is only one of the impossible assumptions made by Joyce, one of the unmeetable requirements infl icted upon his readers. Being a Dubliner is not enough (far from it) to be an

Writing Space

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

213

adequate reader of Ulysses, and it is certainly not enough to be able to write Ulysses. About artificial memory see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). About its importance for Joyce, see Robert Adams Day, “Dante, Ibsen, Joyce, Epiphanies, and the Art of Memory,” JJQ, 25:3 (Spring 1988), 357–362; Jacques Mailhos, “The Art of Memory: Joyce and Perec,” in Transcultural Joyce, ed. K. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 151–169; D. Ferrer, “Between Inventio and Memoria: Locations of ‘Aeolus,’” in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, ed. M. Beja and D. Norris (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1996), 190–197; and the section on “Loci Memoriae” in Classic Joyce, ed. Franca Ruggieri (Bulzoni Editore, 1999), 355–400. “Joyce at Work on ‘Cyclops’: Toward a Biography of Ulysses,” JJQ 44:2 (Winter 2007), 217–245. The inscription of a new text in the margins of a different work by the same author is an intermediary problem. Joyce’s Scribbledehobble could perhaps be described in those terms. A strange case is the early draft of the Tristan and Isolde passage of Finnegans Wake, which is partly written in the margin of a previously written poem, “Nightpiece.” Danis Rose, contradicting David Hayman’s Wake in Transit (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990, 56–92), has argued that this was a simple coincidence (“The Beginning of all Thisorder of Work in Progress,” James Joyce Quarterly 28.4 [1991], 957–965), but the recently discovered manuscripts, now in the NLI, suggest that Joyce tried deliberately to incorporate some of his poems in the early sketches—or to write those sketches around the poems. Part of the fi rst draft of “Cyclops” is written on the margin of a poem by Verlaine. As far as we can tell, this seems to be purely fortuitous, but it marks, nevertheless, a kind of acknowledged allegiance to Symbolism. And they are better known. Much of the early material used for the writing of Ulysses is not extant. This is also true of the interlinear insertions and of part of the text of the main column, but here as elsewhere, the margin is the favorite and emblematic transitional surface. See Geert Lernout, James Joyce, Reader, Dublin: NLI “Joyce Studies 2004,” and Susan Brown, “The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Solved,” Genetic Joyce Studies 8 (Spring 2007), www.geneticjoycestudies.org/GJS7/GJS7brown.html, Figures 4, 5, and 8. In the early part of his life, Joyce seems to have used various bits of papers, gathering them in envelopes before he copied them on notesheets or notebooks. See Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”, and Other Writings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 176–177, online at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/JoyceColl.BudgenUlysses. See Daniel Ferrer, “Towards a Marginalist Economy of Textual Genesis,” Reading Notes, Variants 2–3 (2004), 7–18. Notebook VI.A, Scribbledehobble, is an exception in this as in other respects. Again, Scribbledehobble differs visibly from the other Finnegans Wake notebooks (but is similar to the Ulysses notebooks, which are probably also copied from other notebooks). Instead of being piled up, the notes are concatenated into lines and the semblance of paragraphs, but they remain discrete units, syntactically unrelated to one another. See “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 350–377.

214 Daniel Ferrer 29. In Scribbledehobble, however, the gathering of the units in thematic clusters certainly played an important part in the elaboration of the themes. 30. See Daniel Ferrer, “Clementis’s Cap: Retroaction and Persistence in the Genetic Process,” trans. Marlena G. Corcoran, Yale French Studies 89 (1996), 223–236.

Contributors

Valérie Bénéjam is Maître de Conférences in English literature at the Université de Nantes. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she wrote her PhD under the supervision of Jean-Michel Rabaté at the University of Burgundy in Dijon. She has written numerous articles on Joyce, which have appeared in European Joyce Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi), in various French journals, or have been published online (Genetic Joyce Studies, Hypermedia Joyce Studies). A member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation and of the editorial board of EJS, she is currently completing a book-length study of Ulysses titled All About Molly and working on Joyce and theater. John Bishop is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in twentieth-century British and American literature. In addition to having written numerous articles on Joyce, he is the author of a study of Finnegans Wake that has become a classic of Joyce criticism, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). He is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation. Eric Bulson is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (2006) and Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination (2007). Daniel Ferrer is Director of Research at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (CNRS-ENS) in Paris. He is co-editor of the journal Genesis. The books he has published include Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (Routledge, 1990), Ulysse à l’article: Joyce aux marges du roman (Éditions du Lérot, 1992), Writing its own wrunes for ever: Essays in Joycean Genetics (Éditions du Lérot, 1998), Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories (CNRS Éditions, 1998), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Pennsylvania University Press, 2004), La Textologie russe (CNRS Éditions, 2007), Logiques du brouillon: Modèles pour critique génétique (Seuil, April

216

Contributors

2011). With Vincent Deane and Geert Lernout, he is currently editing the Finnegans Wake notebooks (Brepols Publishers). Luke Gibbons is Professor of Irish Literary and Cultural Studies at the School of English, Drama and Media Studies, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He formerly taught at the University of Notre Dame and Dublin City University. His publications include Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonialism and Irish Culture (2004), Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (2003), The Quiet Man (2002), Transformations in Irish Culture (1996), and he has cowritten (with Kevin Rockett and John Hill) Cinema and Ireland (1988), the pioneering study of Irish cinema. He was a contributing editor to Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), and has edited the collections, Re-Inventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (with Peadar Kirby and Michael Cronin, 2002), and The Theatre of Irish Cinema (with Dudley Andrew), a special issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism (2002). Liam Lanigan has written a doctoral dissertation titled “‘An Engineer at Work?’: Reading James Joyce in the Context of Urban Planning,” under the supervision of Anne Fogarty at University College Dublin. This is where he has been working and teaching since 2005. He has also taught at the University of Kaposva’r, Hungary and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he received his MA in 2004. Laurent Milesi is a Reader in Twentieth-Century English/American Literature and Critical Theory at Cardiff University and is a member of the ITEM-CNRS Research Group on James Joyce’s manuscripts in Paris. He wrote numerous essays on Joyce and related aspects of modernism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century (American) poetry, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, with a particular emphasis on Derrida and, increasingly, Hélène Cixous. His edited collection, James Joyce and the Difference of Language, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003 (digitally reprinted in 2007), and his annotated translation of Jacques Derrida’s H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire . . . came out with Stanford University Press in 2006. His annotated translations of Cixous’s study of Beckett, Le Voisin de zéro, as well as of Philippines have both been published this year by Polity Press. He is currently working on a translation of her novel Tombe, for Seagull Press, and preparing a collection of her shorter essays on Jacques Derrida. He is also co-editing a collection of essays on Credo Credit Crisis as well as a book based on the “Zoontotechnics (Animality / Technicity)” conference he recently organized in Cardiff. He has also been working on two long-term monograph projects: on the sense of ‘(non-)place’ in Jacques Derrida and on “Post-Effects: Literature, Theory and the Future Perfect.”

Contributors 217 Katherine O’Callaghan teaches at University College Dublin and National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She held a postdoctoral research position at the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She wrote her PhD at University College Dublin on the topic of James Joyce and music. She has written several articles on Joyce and is currently preparing a book entitled The Space Between: Music and Language in the Writings of James Joyce. Forthcoming publications include a collection of essays, co-edited with Oona Frawley, Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse Press). Michael Rubenstein is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches twentieth-century Irish, British, and postcolonial literature. His book, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) examines the role of civic infrastructures in Irish modernist literature and in other later twentieth-century postcolonial literary traditions. Sam Slote is Lecturer in James Joyce Studies and Critical Theory at Trinity College, Dublin. He is co-editor of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter by Chapter Genetic Guide (with Luca Crispi, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), of a volume of European Joyce Studies: Genitricksling Joyce (with Wim Van Mierlo, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), and of Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (with David Hayman, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). He has written numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, Queneau, Modernism, literary theory, and genetic criticism. He is currently writing a book on Joyce and Nietzsche. David Spurr is Professor of English at the Université de Genève, specializing in modern literature, comparative literature, and literary theory. He has published extensively on Joyce. Most recent books include Joyce and the Scene of Modernity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). He is also the co-editor of The Space of English (with Cornelia Tschichold, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Series, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005). His current work is on literature and architecture. André Topia is professor of English Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris). He has edited various Victorian and Modernist novels for French publishers and has written on Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and more generally Victorian and modernist fiction and poetry.

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Index

A acoustics, 11, 13, 36n19, 55–66: architectural, 59, 61–65 Act of Union (1801), 94, 103 actualization, 43, 207, 211 Adams, Robert Martin, 82, 200n11 Aesop, 30 Agamben, Giorgio, 159 ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle), 24, 30, 33, 71, 168, 177, 180, 185, 188 alterity, 205–206, 208. See also foreignness; otherness Anderson, Chester G., 107n24 Aquinas, Thomas, 48 Archimedes, 63 architecture, 6, 8, 55–58, 62, 64, 66, 92, 93–96, 98, 104–105, 136, 155: of Joyce’s work, 38, 56–57, 67n9, 83. See also acoustics, architectural Archytus of Tarentum, 34n2 Arendt, Hannah, 117 Aristotle, 11, 32, 117, 120–121: Physics, 37n26; Poetics, 82, 199 astronomy, 3, 14n1, 31 Atherton, James, 34n1, 154n19 Attridge, Derek, 17n17, 83 Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis, 110–112 Augé, Marc, 107n30 Austen, Jane: Emma, 156–157

B Babelization, 2, 147–150, 187 Bachelard, Gaston, 26 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 128, 130. See also chronotope; dialogism Balzac, Honoré de, 8, 126 Banfield, Ann, 123n20 Barricelli, Jean-Pierre, 174–175, 188

Barklie, Robert, 122n15 Barta, Peter I., 16n11 Barthes, Roland, 78, 91, 100–101, 102 Baudelaire, Charles, 65 Beck, Harald, 202n42 Beckett, Samuel, 23, 27, 67n7 Begnal, Michael, 16n11 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 87n31, 93, 135–136 Benstock, Bernard, 14n1, 16n15, 66n3, 73, 200n15 Benstock, Shari, 18n28, 161, 171n6 Benveniste, Émile, 151 Bergson, Henri, 4, 5 Berkeley, George, 51 Berlin, 135 Bersani, Leo, 121n3 Bhabha, Homi, 122n18 Bidwell, Bruce, 142n3 Bishop, John, 11: Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 14n5, 35n7, 36n19, 147 Blake, William: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 45 Blanchot, Maurice: The Space of Literature, 3, 175, 188 Blavatsky, Madame, 117: Isis Unveiled, 22 blindness, 5, 34, 43, 50–51, 58–59, 184. See also visual impairment Bloom, Leopold, 8, 9, 41, 43, 50, 55, 57–59, 61–65, 75, 79, 80–81, 82, 84, 110, 111, 130–134, 138–140, 142, 143n18, 161–166, 170, 176, 178, 180, 181, 184–187, 188, 191, 193, 195–198, 208, 210 Bloom, Molly, 9, 58, 61, 63, 64, 75, 79, 81, 89n46, 110, 164–165, 179, 184–185, 188, 195, 196, 197, 198

232 Index Bloomsday, 7, 9 Bolens, Guillemette, 172n20 Borges, Jorge Luis, 84 boundary 2, 16n10 Brady, Joseph, 95, 108–109n36 Brannon, Julie Sloan, 85n4 Breton, André, 135 Brion, Marcel, 4 British Empire, 2, 30, 33, 70, 72, 123n25, 126–127, 128, 139: and the post 159–160 (see also post) Brown, Norman O., 36n13 Brown, Richard, 12, 16n11 Brown, Susan, 213n23 Brown, Terence, 17n17 Bruno, Giordano, 32, 150 Budgen, Frank, 17n21, 18n25, 55, 57–58, 131–132, 139, 191, 194, 213n24 Bulson, Eric, 8–9 Bush, Ronald, 107n22 Butler, Christopher, 17n16, 79 Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, 3 Byrne, John Francis, 191, 194 Byron, Lord, 80–81

C Cage, John, 79, 82 Cagniard de la Tour, Charles, 65 call and response. See leitmotif capitalism, 130, 136, 139 cardinal points, 27–28, 137 Cartesian: coordinates / grid, 8, 29, 160; space, 11 cartography, 128, 140–142, 188: literary, 8, 126–127. See also maps; topography Casey, Edward, 28–29, 32, 34n2, 35n12, 36n15 Cavell, Richard, 68n26 Certeau, Michel de, 16n11, 101 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 130 Chambers, William, 106n14 Cheng, Vincent, 17n17, 17n20, 107n34 chora, 24–25 Chouvel, Jean-Marc, 68n23 chronotope, 128–129 Chtcheglov, Ivan, 137 cinema 38 city: as discourse, 100, 102; European, 156; life, 5; as narrative, 99; as rationally integrated system, 91–94, 96, 97, 100, 102; as text,

12, 13, 69–85, 194. See also cityscape; geometry of the city; guidebooks; urban planning cityscape 7, 91–106, 191 Cixous, Hélène, 49 claritas, 49 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 209 colonial condition, 6, 7, 71, 80, 85, 94, 96–97, 109, 126–127, 139, 152, 159–160, 182. See also British Empire; Ireland; nationhood; nationalism Colum, Mary, 69–72 Colum, Padraic, 70 community, 6, 95, 116, 118, 120–121 compositio loci (composition of place), 40, 52 Conley, Tim, 202n32 Conroy, Gabriel, 39, 52, 91, 99, 102– 106, 117–121, 181, 185–186, 188 Conroy, Gretta, 102, 103, 105, 117–119, 185–186 consonantia, 49, 72 Cope, Jackson I., 98 Corbusier, Le, 91, 92–93, 99, 100, 102: Ville Radieuse, 99 cosmopolitics, 145, 152 cosmos, 1, 2, 32, 52 Crary, Jonathan, 143n10 Curran, Constantine, 192 Cullen, Fintan, 67n8

D Dante Alighieri, 36n21 Darwin, Charles, 4 Davis, Alex, 17n16 Day, Robert Adams, 121n3, 213n17 Deane, Seamus, 17n17, 71 Deane, Sir Thomas, 56–57 Debord, Guy, 125, 136–138 decolonization, 12. See also colonial condition Dedalus, Stephen, 8, 11, 21, 39, 43–53, 59, 60, 75, 76, 80, 82, 85, 116, 120, 133, 140, 142, 143n18, 156, 160, 176–177, 179, 180–184, 186–189, 197, 204, 206, 208, 209 defamiliarization, 7, 11, 73–75, 152 Delaney, Frank, 142n3 Deleuze, Gilles, 162–163, 165, 167 Democritus, 124n33 dérive, 9, 135–139, 141

Index Derrida, Jacques, 12, 35n12, 145–153, 156, 158, 168, 171n6, 212n15 desire, 13, 50, 138, 156, 160–168 détournement, 9, 138–139, 141 dialogism, 58–59, 64, 119, 208, 210 Dickens, Charles, 8, 10, 123n24, 126, 129: Bleak House, 130–131 disorientation, 8, 12, 125–142 Divus, Andreas, 194 Döblin, Alfred: Berlin Alexanderplatz, 5, 17n19, 129, 130 doppelganger, 7 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 84 drafts. See manuscripts Dublin, 3, 4, 5–9, 12, 13, 14, 41, 55–56, 57–59, 66, 69–75, 78, 80, 82, 83–84, 91–106, 109, 113–114, 125–129, 131–134, 138–140, 141–142, 148, 156, 157, 159, 165–166, 169–170, 181, 187, 188, 203, 208: bird’seye view on, 134; corporation, 116; etymology, 114, 116; rebuilt from Joyce’s work,7, 55, 142, 191. See also space, urban; local culture; maps; Thom’s Directory Duffy, Enda, 107n30, 126, 200 Dujardin, Édouard, 129 Dumas, Alexandre (père): The Count of Monte Cristo, 39 dynamics, 13, 58, 65, 93, 99, 101, 148, 175–176, 189, 203–205: of desire (see desire)

E Eccles Street, 9, 55, 110, 111, 143n18, 181, 191, 194, 195 Eco, Umberto, 72, 84 Einstein, Albert, 4 electricity, 109, 116, 118–121 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 66, 93, 175 Ellis, Alexander J., 63 Ellmann, Richard, 38, 98, 116, 187, 190n10 enclosure, 20, 22, 30, 38 Enlightenment, 94, 95, 99, 130, 156 epiphany 39–40, 48–49, 156, 180, 182, 187, 188 episteme, 115–117 error, 13, 193–200 ethics, 12, 148, 150, 153 Euclid: Euclidian plane, 8; First Theorem, 4, 25–26. See also gnomon

233

Europe, 2, 7, 30–31, 70–72, 94, 156 exile, 7, 13, 138, 147, 168, 177, 181, 184, 188 expansion, 13, 20–22, 33, 38, 42–43, 46, 49–52, 141, 203–205 eye. See gaze

F face, 41–49, 53 Fagan, Terry, 107n29 Faulkner, William, 143n13 Ferenczi, Sandor, 35n11 Ferrer, Daniel, 13–14, 19n33, 61–62, 68n22 filiative relations, 93 Flaubert, Gustave, 107n22: Dictionary of Received Ideas, 193 Flynn, Deirdre, 19n31, 107n20 Fogarty, Anne, 6, 9, 18n26, 18n29 foreignness, 135, 147–153. See also alterity; otherness Foucault, Michel, 34n3, 81, 99, 101 Fox, L. Webster, 42 Frank, Joseph: “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 15n10, 175, 207 Fraser, Murray, 106n13 free indirect discourse, 71–72, 132 Freedman, Ariela, 122n3 Freud, Sigmund, 23, 25 Furey, Michael, 6, 105, 117–121, 185–186 Futurists, 135

G Gabler, Hans Walter, 81, 193, 202n42 Gallaher, Brendan, 38 Garvey, Johanna X. K., 19n32 gaslight, 6, 117, 118–121 gasworks, 109, 117–121 gaze, 10, 38–53. See also space, visual apprehension of; visual impairment gender. See space and gender genetic criticism. See manuscripts geography, 1–3, 11, 13, 113–115, 129–133, 137–142, 145–148, 157, 158, 161, 177, 182, 186, 188 geolinguistics, 12, 145–148, 150 geometry, 3, 8, 10, 11, 25–26, 29, 40, 64, 161: of the city, 92. See also Cartesian coordinates; Euclid geopolitics, 148, 153 ghost, 98–99, 117–120, 186. See also haunt

234

Index

Gibbons, Luke, 7, 117, 118, 120, 122n16 Gibson, Andrew, 123n25 Giedion, Carola & Siegfried, 155 Gifford, Don, 66n4, 124n26, 200n13, 202n35 Gilbert, Stuart, 57, 178 Gillet, Louis, 34 Gilloch, Graeme, 93 gnomon, 43, 49, 86nn18–19 Goodman, Kevis, 120 Google, 127: Google Street Maps, 127, 140–141 Gorman, Herbert, 57 Gottfried, Roy, 10–11, 67n11, 86n9 Greene, Robert, 202n32 Griffith, Arthur, 71 Groden, Michael, 19n39, 66n4, 208 Grosz, Elizabeth, 35n12 guidebooks, 7, 12, 125, 127, 137, 139, 142, 194 Gunn, Ian, 17n23, 55, 126, 139, 200nn7–8, 200n11

H habitus, 145–153 Hanna, Joseph, 200n11 Harding, Desmond, 16n11 Hart, Clive, 17n23, 66n2, 73, 81, 113–114, 118, 126, 139, 142n3, 173–174, 191, 196–197, 200n11, 202n42 haunt, 7, 79, 98, 117–120, 135, 186, 211. See also ghost Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (Baron), 94, 95, 136 Hayman, David, 87n32, 212n4, 213n19 HCE (H. C. Earwicker), 23, 26, 29, 33, 36n19, 145, 148, 150, 153, 168 hearing, 11, 58–66. See also acoustics Heffer, Linda, 142n3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 65, 145, 148 Hegglund, Jon, 127 Heidegger, Martin, 16n10, 146, 152–153, 158–159 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 63–65 Heraclitus, 153 Herman, David, 174 Herring, Philip F., 86n18, 89n56 Herrmann, Claudine, 19n32 historical narrative, 93, 95, 104, 105 history, 27, 105: of Dublin, 69, 74–75, 78, 81–82, 97–100, 105, 114–

115, 117, 119, 127, 133, 139, 146. See also memory, historical narrative, Vico Homer, 115–116: Homeric epithet, 173; Odyssey, 56, 70, 110–111, 170–171, 179, 181, 194–195, 208 hospitality, 12, 145–153 Howes, Marjorie, 17n17, 124n32 Hugo, Victor, 109, 115 Humphrey, Robert, 87n28 Husserl, Edmund, 31 Hutchins, Patricia, 140, 142nn2–3 hybridity, 12, 148, 150, 152 Hyman, Louis, 195

I Ibsen, Henrik, 82 infrastructure, 6, 115–116, 120–121 Ingram, John Kells, 104 Inhelder, Bärbel, 36n15–16, 36n18 inner speech, 11, 56, 62, 75. See also stream of consciousness interior monologue, 9, 129, 132. See also stream of consciousness intertext, 57, 173, 208–210 intrauterine experience. See space, intrauterine Ireland, 20, 31, 70–75, 96, 98, 109, 127, 128, 138, 139, 159–160, 171n6: rural vs. urban, 6, 71, 103, 121. See also colonial condition; nationhood; nationalism Irish Revival, 6, 86n16, 117–118 Irish Tourist Board, 7 Iser, Wolfgang, 174 Issy, 29–30, 33

J Jakobson, Roman, 88n38, 207, 210 Jameson, Fredric, 89n50, 93, 95, 110, 143n6 Jenkins, Lee M., 17n16 Johnson, Cathy, 122n15 Johnson, Jeri, 108n38 Joyce, James, works: Chamber Music, 67n18, 176; Dubliners, 6, 9, 10, 39–43, 46, 50, 57, 71, 78, 91–106, 131, 176, 185, 191; individual stories: “After the Race,” 90n58; “Araby,” 10, 39, 40–41, 52, 183; “The Boarding House,” 183; “Counterparts,” 42, 46, 50; “The Dead,” 6, 39,

Index 52, 81, 91, 97, 98, 99, 101–106, 109, 117–121, 177, 181, 185– 186; “An Encounter,” 46, 179, 187; “Eveline,” 97, 102, 183; “A Little Cloud,” 6, 91–92, 95–97, 102, 103; “A Mother,” 185; “A Painful Case,” 42–43, 202n34; “The Sisters,” 43, 49, 52, 86n18, 179, 184; “Two Gallants,” 41, 46, 50, 96; Finnegans Wake, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 20–37, 58, 63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 145–153, 156, 166–171, 176, 179, 187, 191, 208–211 (see also “Work in Progress”); chapters and episodes: I,1 (The “Prankquean”), 147; I,5 (The “Letter” or “Mamafesta”), 145, 164, 167; I,6 (“The Mookse and the Gripes”), 4, 20, 25, 30–34, 147; I,8 (“Anna Livia Plurabelle”), 23, 188; II,1 (“The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies”), 35–36n12, 148; II,2 (“The Geometry Lesson”), 4, 25–26, 148, 211n2; II,3 (“How Buckley Shot the Russian General”), 146, 147; Book III (“The Four Watches of Shaun”), 29–30, 33; III,1 (“The Ondt and the Gracehoper”), 3, 4, 30, 37n30, 159, 168; III,3 (“Haveth Childers Everywhere”), 157; IV (ALP’s final monologue), 180, 185, 188; Giacomo Joyce, 171n6; “Island of Saints and Sages,” 152; Letters, 38, 98; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1, 2, 10, 11, 21, 25, 31, 38–53, 85, 86n19, 109, 156, 176, 179, 180–182, 184, 189, 191; Scribbledehobble, 213n19, 213nn26–27, 214n29; Stephen Hero, 39–40; “Trust Not Appearances,” 42; Ulysses, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 21, 34, 46, 49, 53, 55–66, 69–83, 97, 105, 109–117, 121, 125– 129, 131–135, 138–142, 156, 159, 166, 169–171, 176–179, 181–184, 186, 191–200, 203, 207–209; episodes: “Æolus,” 60, 132, 159; “Calypso,” 60, 143n18, 164, 195; “Circe,” 10, 160, 161–163, 165–166, 180, 182,186, 197, 198, 211n2;

235

“Cyclops,” 41, 75, 143n18, 169, 180, 208; “Eumaeus,” 84, 170, 205; “Hades,” 132, 197; “Ithaca,” 8, 21, 23, 57, 60, 81, 82, 110–111, 113, 116, 138, 193, 195–196; “Lestrygonians,” 55–57, 133, 169, 179, 191, 196–197, 201n29; “Lotus Eaters,” 61, 80, 131, 132, 133, 143n18, 164, 208; “Nausicaa,” 39, 41, 43, 143n18, 178, 184, 195, 212n11; “Nestor,” 143n18, 160, 202n35; “Oxen of the Sun,” 23, 60, 180, 193; “Penelope,” 9, 60, 67n18, 129; “Proteus,” 5, 26, 51, 59, 60, 143n18, 156, 183, 187, 188, 204–208; “Scylla and Charybdis,” 10, 60–61, 177, 208; “Sirens,” 26, 36n19, 41, 50, 58, 61–66, 174, 176–177, 184, 185, 187, 198, 204–205, 208; “Telemachus,” 49, 182; “Wandering Rocks,” 6, 12, 111, 113– 117, 120, 128, 132, 133–134, 169, 180, 197, 201n29; “Work in Progress”, 4, 34, 207 Joyce, Nora, 38, 97, 186, 208 Joyce, Stanislaus, 38, 124n28, 187

K Kain, Richard M., 200n11 Kandinsky, Wassily, 65 Kant, Immanuel, 14, 27–28, 32, 59: Critique of Pure Reason, 28 Kelly, Joseph, 71 Kenner, Hugh, 87n32, 89n48, 143n18, 201n23 Kiberd, Declan, 85n4 Kidd, John, 80–81 Klee, Paul, 65 Knuth, Leo, 17n23, 73, 81, 126, 139, 142n3, 200n11 Koyré, Alexander, 37n32 Kristeva, Julia, 19n32, 24–25, 34, 35n12

L Lacan, Jacques, 30, 161–163, 165, 167–168 language(s), 2, 11, 12–13, 25, 58, 69, 73, 75–76, 79–80, 105, 116, 145–153, 159, 205, 207: Irish, 103; materiality of, 4, 12, 167–168; mimetic quality of, 60 Lanigan, Liam, 6, 18n26

236

Index

Latour, Bruno, 122n17 Lawrence, D.H., 10 Leerssen, Joseph, 121n3 Lefebvre, Henri, 5, 8, 9, 12, 18n27, 37n29, 73. See also space, lived leitmotif, 13, 173–189: definition and origins, 173–175; translated by Joyce as idée-mère, 174 Lernout, Geert, 213n23 Leslie, Shane, 71, 89n49 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Laocoon, 5, 15n10, 59, 65, 190n6 letters. See post Levinas, Emmanuel, 150 Lewin, Bertram D., 35n10 Lewis, Wyndham: Time and Western Man, 4 Liffey, river, 24, 80, 84, 113, 131, 134, 140, 179, 188 Linati, Carlo, 55–57 linguistics, 12–13. See also geolinguistics; language(s) Little Review, The, 132 Lloyd, David, 93 local knowledge, 4, 5, 7, 12, 15n6, 71–73, 79–84. See also placenames loci memoriae, 208. See also memory Lock, Charles, 171n5 Lodge, David, 109 London, 5, 8, 71, 72, 94, 96–97, 102, 126, 130–131, 137 Lukacs, Georg, 129–130 Lyons, John B., 42, 202n34

M MacDowell, Gerty 39, 41, 43, 188 Mahler, Gustav, 68n25 Mailhos, Jacques, 213n17 Malcolm, Norman, 87n30 Mamalujo, 27, 37n27 Mann, Thomas, 173–175, 188: Tonio Kröger, 175 manuscripts, 13–14, 57, 61–62, 79, 146, 197–199, 203–211. See also proof pages maps, 8, 9, 12, 125–128, 133–134, 137–142. See also cartography; topography margin/marginality, 2, 13, 41, 204–211 Martin, Timothy, 173–174 masochism, 161–163, 165 Massey, Doreen, 18n26 mathematics, 8, 62, 64

Matisse, Henri, 70 McArthur, Murray, 171n6 McCabe, Colin, 80 McCourt, John, 107n25 McHugh, Roland 35n4, 180 McLuhan, Marshall, 66 McParland, Edward, 106n12 Meaney, Gerardine, 19n31 Melville, Hermann: Moby Dick, 16n15, 66n3, 73, 115 memory, 14, 23, 53, 57–58, 63, 69, 73, 80, 84, 117, 128, 173–174, 177, 192, 207, 208, 211: historical, 97–99, 104–105 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 28 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 83 Milesi, Laurent, 4, 12 Miller, D. A., 89n48, 123n22 mimesis, 72, 199. See also error; space, representation of mindscape, 10 miscegenation. See hybridity Mitchell, Andrew, 171n6 Modernism, 4, 5, 7, 16n10, 17n16, 71–73,80, 83, 92, 109–110, 115, 121, 129–132, 135–136, 175 modernity,6, 7, 29, 32, 72, 93, 95–96, 98–99, 109–110, 118, 121: colonial, 7, 84, 109 modernization, 6, 95, 109–110, 112, 136. See also technology; tekhne Mondrian, Piet, 83 monuments, 91, 93, 99, 102, 103–105, 155. See also architecture Moore, Thomas, 133, 186 Moretti, Franco, 72, 84 motif. See leitmotif Mumford, Lewis, 106n7 music, 11, 13, 33, 58, 59, 60–62, 65, 173–174, 176–177, 181, 185, 188

N Nabokov, Vladimir, 139–140, 202n34 nacheinander, 5, 15n10, 204 Nadel, Ira B., 17n19 narrative technique, 6, 14n1, 71–72, 82–83, 91, 96, 97, 113, 115, 121, 125–126, 129–134, 140: and description, 191; and digression, 110–112; fragmented, 207; and repetition, 173–174. See also omniscient narration

Index

237

O’Brien, Barry, 88n41 O’Callaghan, Katherine, 13 O’Connell, Daniel, 102–105 O’Flaherty, Gerry, 202n42 omniscient narration, 113, 115–116, 131–132: and panoptical narration, 123n22 opera, 61, 65 optics, 3, 10, 38–53. See also space, visual apprehension of O’Rourke, John, 202n42 otherness, 12–13, 146, 150–152, 156, 161–162, 165. See also alterity; foreignness Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of “Work in Progress,” 4, 23, 27

Pierce, David, 17n17, 96 Pike, David, 122n19 place-names, 15n6, 78–79, 125–126, 129, 131–134, 156 planning. See urban planning Plato, 24, 32, 115, 149, 158, 199: Timaeus, 24, 25 Pleasants, Nigel, 87n30 Plock, Vike Martina, 19n35, 68n20 Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Purloined Letter,” 161–162, 176 Pope, Alexander, 76 post, 12–13, 29, 32, 132, 155–171: postal address, 1, 156–158, 162, 163, 168–170 (see also Thom’s Directory); history of the postal system, 157–158; letters, 156–158, 160–171; postcards, 155–166, 169–171. See also Shaun the Post postcolonial, 6, 109, 126–127, 152 Pound, Ezra, 5, 7, 78, 134–35, 175: Cantos, 194–195 Power, Arthur, 5 Praxiteles, 67n8 proof pages, 193, 203, 205. See also manuscripts Proust, Marcel, 4, 175 Prunty, Jacinta, 106n16 psychogeography, 137, 141 public works, 6, 109–121 Pugh, Thomas, 70

P

R

page. See space of the page; paperspace Panopticon, 99 paperspace,1, 3, 13, 203 parallax, 14n1, 31, 46 Paris, 5, 7, 8, 56, 69–71, 92, 94, 96, 99, 115, 126, 135–137, 142, 156, 157, 181, 188, 216 Parmenides, 148 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 79, 84 patriotism. See nationalism Pavel, Thomas G., 89n48 Pearl, Cyril, 142n3 perception. See space, perception of Perec, Georges, 74 phenomenology, 10, 14, 75: and music, 68n23 Phoenix Park, 79, 102, 103, 113, 134 photography, 38, 40, 45, 51–52, 73, 85n6, 126, 127, 135, 137, 140 Piaget, Jean, 25

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 12, 17n22, 19n36, 67n14, 181, 212n13 Raleigh, John Henry, 201n24, 202n34 Rauschenberg, Robert, 79, 82 Rayleigh, John William Strutt (3rd Baron): The Theory of Sound, 64–65 realism, 8, 10, 60, 72–73, 81–83, 88n38, 96, 115, 117, 126, 129–132, 136 reality effect, 78 representation. See space, representation of Richards, Grant, 86nn11–12, 97 Riffaterre, Michael, 78–79 Rigney, Ann, 83 Riquelme, John Paul, 185, 190n17 Roheim, Geza, 35nn5–6, 37n27 Roman Catholic Church, 30–33, 97–98, 123n25

Nash, John, 94 nationalism, 2, 6, 79, 103, 146, 177, 179, 186 nationhood, 6, 109, 118, 120, 148, 182 nebeneinander,5, 15n10, 174, 204 Neefs, Jacques, 212n5 Neillands, Robin, 107n35 Nicholson, Robert, 143n3 Nolan, Emer, 17n17 notebooks, 13–14, 30, 52, 57, 146, 195, 208–210. See also manuscripts

O

238

Index

Roman Empire, 30–33, 98, 147 Romanticism, 81 Rome, 97–99 Rose, Danis, 197, 213n19 Rossini, Gioachino: Stabat Mater, 61 Roughley, Alan, 171n6 Rubenstein, Michael, 6, 121n3 rurality. See Ireland, rural vs. urban Ruskin, John, 56 Russell, Bertrand, 4

S Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 163 Sadler, Simon, 144n23 Said, Edward, 93 Sand, George, 144n25 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 145–146 Sayeau, Michael, 122n9 Scheler, Max, 75–76 Schoenberg, Arnold, 83 Scholes, Robert, 88n39 Schoonbroodt, Jean, 67n12 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 65 Schwartz, Daniel R., 123n25 Seidel, Michael, 114 Seidman, Robert J., 66n4, 200n11 semaphore 43–44, 50 semiology, 25, 34, 100 Senn, Fritz, 172n17, 202n42 Sennett, Richard, 93 sewer, 6, 109, 113–114, 117 Shakespeare, William, 61, 208: Hamlet, 59; The Winter’s Tale, 197 Shaun the Post,27, 29–30, 32–33, 159–161, 168–169, 171n6 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Prometheus Unbound, 45 Shem the Penman, 30, 33, 148, 166, 168 Sheridan, Edel, 94 Shloss, Carol, 89n46 sight. See space, visual apprehension of Simmel, Georg, 135 Situationists, 9, 136–140 Slocombe, George, 192 Slote, Sam, 13, 212n10 Soja, Edward, 18n26 Soler, Colette, 165 Solomos, Makis, 68n23 Spanos, William, 16n10 space: acoustic (see acoustics); as abstraction, 8, 11, 28, 31, 129; auditory apprehension of, 38, 53 (see also acoustics); and/

of the body, 25–26, 28, 30, 43, 46, 48, 51, 53; as category of perception, 14, 21 (see also Kant, Immanuel); and character, 6, 91–105, 129–130; of the city (see city; Dublin); collective(see community; space, social); conceived, 8–9, 14; etymology of, 20–22; extension of (see expansion); and gender, 9, 45; infinite, 21, 32, 60; interior, 9, 10, 26, 43, 45, 47, 50, 53; intrapsychic, 9, 10, 13, 14, 29; intrauterine, 11, 23–25, 34; lived, 5, 7, 8–9, 11, 14, 91, 101, 141 (see also Lefebvre, Henri); of the page, 2, 3, 42, 203–204 (see also paperspace); perception of, 4, 9–12, 13, 14, 28, 38–53, 55–66; vs. place, 6, 11, 32–34, 107n30 (see also Casey, Edward); and politics, 1–3, 6, 12, 18n26, 91–96, 101–106, 125–128, 136, 139, 141, 161; private, 47, 80, 119; and reading process, 2, 12, 55, 173, 188 (see also Frank, Joseph); representation of, 7, 8, 14, 27–28, 38, 73–74, 77, 125, 127, 128–130, 137, 139, 141, 161, 191–196, 199–200 (see also mimesis, Thom’s Directory); and rhythm, 5, 11, 25, 33–34, 38, 50, 53, 59, 60, 65; social, 9, 12, 13, 14, 30, 37n29, 77, 82, 93, 96, 99–101; structured with the number four, 27–29; textual, 111 (see also space of the page; paperspace); and time, 3–5, 12, 30, 33, 65–66, 129 (see also chronotope); unconscious, 11, 23, 25, 26, 30 (see also space, intrauterine); urban, 3, 4, 5–9, 12, 13, 14, 55, 103, 109, 135, 137, 194 (see also city; Dublin; urban planning); virtual, 55, 95, 140; visual apprehension of, 10–11, 26, 34, 38–53, 55, 57–58, 66, 124n33 (see also visual impairment) Spaß machen, 3, 14 spatial form. See Frank, Joseph spatiality. See space Spurr, David, 12–13 Stein, Gertrude, 4 Steiberg, Leo, 72–73 Stendhal, 208

Index Stevenson, Norah, 143n5 Stiegler, Bernard, 115–116, 121 Stillman, Chris, 122n15 Straumann, Heinrich, 14n6 stream of consciousness, 4, 75, 80, 114–116. See also inner speech; interior monologue Surrealists, 135 Symbolism, 207, 213n20

T technology, 6, 99, 101, 109–111, 113, 115–117, 120, 121 tekhne, 115–116 telecommunications, 132, 159, 176–177, 179 Terrel, Carroll F., 201n22 Thacker, Andrew, 143n6 Theall, Donald, 68n26 theater, 61, 211n2 threshold, 147–148, 205 time. See space and time Thom’s Directory, 13, 79, 81, 128, 191–200 Tindall, William York, 142nn2–3 Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, 129–130 Topia, André, 10 topography, 3, 8, 13, 78, 80, 81, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 125, 127, 130, 133, 134, 135, 137, 140–142, 191–192, 197, 199, 201n29. See also cartography; maps; Thom’s Directory tourism, 7, 79, 98, 132, 155. See also guidebooks; Irish Tourist Board transportation systems, 122n17, 132, 136, 159 Trieste, 7, 69, 71, 142, 156, 188 trompe l’œil, 41, 53 typography, 2, 3, 13, 211–212n2

U Unconscious. See space, unconscious urban planning, 6, 8, 92–96, 99–100, 126, 142 urban space. See space, urban utopia, 3, 101, 110, 113

239

V Valente, Joseph, 94 Van Boheemen, Christine, 18n30 Van Mierlo, Wim, 15n9 Verlaine, 213n21 Vico, Giambattista, 25, 34–35n3, 146, 148 Victoria (Queen), 84 Vidler, Anthony, 99, 105 virtualities, 207, 210–211. See also space, virtual visual impairment, 10–11, 26, 34, 41, 46, 59, 210 voice. See acoustics Voltaire, 156, 209

W Wagner, Richard, 68n25, 173–174 waterworks, 6, 109, 110–115 Weir, David, 54 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley (1st Duke of), 103–104 Whelan, Kevin, 103, 104, 121 Whitley, Catherine, 19n31 Wide Streets Commission, 94 Wilde, Oscar, 202n41 Williams, Raymond, 75 Wilson, Edmund, 30 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 209 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 18n28 Wittgensten, Ludwig, 69, 73–77, 84 Woloch, Alex, 123n24 womb. See space, intrauterine Woolf, Virginia, 5, 67n7, 129, 209, 129: Mrs Dalloway, 16n14, 67n10, 130; To the Lighthouse, 112 Wordsworth, William, 78–79 Wright, Mark, 55

Y Yates, Frances, 213n17 Yeats, William Butler, 87n19, 87n24, 117

Z Zola, Émile, 129: Nana, 129 Zurich, 7, 71, 155, 156, 188