Abstract
After his permanent flight from Ireland in 1904 at the age of 22, for four decades James Joyce obsessively rebuilt with meticulous hyperrealism his native habitat, urban Dublin. He boasted that were Dublin to disappear, it could be reconstructed from the blueprint he created in Ulysses, a virtual guide to its streets, buildings, and commerce. Geographical criticism of Joyce treats each of his works from Dubliners onward as the ultimate realist urban fiction, a unique one-dimensional object, the epitome of the mimetic mode of reading. The revolutionary montage of multiple ‘Dublins’ through a range of historical juxtapositions and varied styles has taken a back seat in Joyce studies. This chapter addresses that neglected underlying cityscape and proposes a reading of one of the multifarious countenances of Dublin in the eighth episode of Ulysses, ‘Lestrygonians’, as a decentred metropolis represented through an accumulation of place names, an exuberance of a monotonous style, and torrents of Leopold Bloom’s interior monologue.
I will show how Dublin is portrayed from the point of view of the rambling Bloom, a practical Dublin user. Special attention will be paid to two cruxes of the episode, the surplus of place names and the lack of descriptions, to argue that on the one hand they create the effect of reality, ushering the reader into the real world more intensely than any novel; on the other hand, they problematise the production of meanings, making the reader suspect the textuality of real life as well as the authenticity of fiction. This problem will be further explored through an examination of the repetitious and distancing style that depicts Bloom’s walking patterns and denies the reader any chance of imaginative enactment of Dublin. I will also discuss how the modern Dublin inundates Bloom’s mind with stimuli, conflating the past and present with various locations, thus subverting the traditional notion of wholeness in time and space. The city transforms into a signifying field in which proper names and what they trigger become signifiers and signifieds, rendering reality multidimensional. I will conclude by demonstrating how the text abandons the representational coherence of the classic novel in favour of a textual urban space rejecting totalisation.
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Notes
- 1.
James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 134.
- 2.
Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), 175.
- 3.
Stewart Bowers et al., ‘Oliver Twist – Mapping Literary London,’ accessed 22 January 2016, http://mappingliterarylondon.weebly.com/oliver-twist.html.
- 4.
Jonathan D Culler, ‘Barthes , Theorist,’ The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 14, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 440.
- 5.
They are proairetic code, hermeneutic code, connotative code, and symbolic code.
- 6.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Noonday P, 1974), 20.
- 7.
Philippe Hamon, ‘On the Major Features of Realist Discourse,’ in Realism, ed. Lilian R. Furst (New York: Longman, 1992), 168.
- 8.
Hamon, ‘On the Major Features of Realist Discourse,’ 168.
- 9.
Benjamin Hrushovski, ‘Fictionality and Fields of Reference: Remarks on a Theoretical Framework,’ Poetics Today 5.2 (1984): 244.
- 10.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 119.
- 11.
Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 10.
- 12.
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses,’ and Other Writings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 70.
- 13.
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 9.
- 14.
Quyen Nguyen, ‘“Dublin what place was it’: Making sense of the textual city in Ulysses’, MoveableType, Vol. 9, ‘Metropolis’ (2017): 4. It could be said that Frank Budgen in James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses sowed the seeds of a geographically focused approach in Joyce’s criticism. Following his lead, Dublin in Ulysses has been consistently compared and conflated with the real city. See earlier works on this topic: Richard Kain, Fabulous Voyager: A Study of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1947), Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), Clive Hart and Leo Knuth, James Joyce’s Dublin – A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of “Ulysses” (Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press, 1975). Many recent articles discuss and compare Joyce’s Dublin to Dublin in 1904. See Enda Duffy, ‘Setting: Dublin 1904/1922’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses, ed. Sean Latham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 81–94; Terence Killeen, ‘Lee Miller: Photographing Joycean Dublin (1946)’ in Voices on Joyce, ed. Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2015), 133–136.
- 15.
David Spurr, Architecture and Modern Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 188.
- 16.
Andrew Thacker. Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 122.
- 17.
Culler explains that ‘Recuperation is a process of making details into signifiants [sic] and naming their signifies [sic]. The drive towards meaning on the reader’s part is extremely powerful, and, as we shall see, the ubiquity of the cultural models and symbolic codes which guide it makes it a difficult process to disrupt.’ Culler, Flaubert: the Uses of Uncertainty, 62.
- 18.
Culler, Flaubert: the Uses of Uncertainty, 72.
- 19.
Joyce, Ulysses, 160.
- 20.
Joyce, Ulysses, 161.
- 21.
Joyce, Ulysses, 161.
- 22.
Joyce, Ulysses, 167.
- 23.
Joyce, Ulysses, 171.
- 24.
Erwin Ray Steinberg, The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in ‘Ulysses’ (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 95.
- 25.
Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 31–36.
- 26.
Joyce, Ulysses, 151.
- 27.
Joyce, Ulysses, 167.
- 28.
Joyce, Ulysses, 168.
- 29.
Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 45.
- 30.
Monica Fludernik also spots this tendency of aloofness in Bloom’s episodes. She notes an ‘independent narrative,’ with a distancing effect, is a result of the ‘tendency towards pedantry and the furnishing of circumstantial detail,’ hence ‘establishing a distinct narrative voice emancipated from Bloom’s point of view’. Monica Fludernik ‘Narrative and Its Development in Ulysses’, Journal of Narrative Technique 16, i (Winter 1986), 17.
- 31.
Barthes , ‘Semiology and Urbanism’ in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 195.
- 32.
Barthes , ‘Semiology and Urbanism’, 199.
- 33.
Joyce, Ulysses, 166.
- 34.
George Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1976), 409.
- 35.
Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 409.
- 36.
Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 410.
- 37.
Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (London; New York: Verso, 1996), 134–135.
- 38.
Joyce, Ulysses, 151.
- 39.
Joyce, Ulysses, 151.
- 40.
Joyce, Ulysses, 152.
- 41.
Joyce, Ulysses, 153.
- 42.
Steinberg, The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in ‘Ulysses’, 52.
- 43.
Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses,’ 21.
- 44.
Charles Peake, James Joyce , the Citizen and the Artist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 200.
- 45.
Barthes , ‘Semiology and Urbanism’, 199.
- 46.
Joyce, Ulysses, 155.
- 47.
Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (London: Routledge, 2003), 34–35.
- 48.
Joyce, Ulysses, 168.
- 49.
Joyce, Ulysses, 168.
- 50.
Roland Barthes, ‘Semiology and Urbanism,’ 198.
- 51.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 365.
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Steinberg, Erwin Ray. The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in “Ulysses.” Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.
Thacker, Andrew. Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
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Nguyen, Q. (2018). ‘Neither This nor That’: The Decentred Textual City in Ulysses. In: Beville, M., Flynn, D. (eds) Irish Urban Fictions. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98322-6_6
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