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Joyce's Book of Memory

The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses

Duke University Press

Personal Memory and the Construction of the Self

The traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, into one stable somebody—FW 107

From his earliest writings through Finnegans Wake, the nature of personal identity is a central question in Joyce's work. As a künstlerroman, Joyce's A Portrait focuses on a young artist's attempts to "find himself," in terms of vocation, of course, but also, literally, in terms of his establishing a coherent sense of self. Ulysses also confronts its characters with the most fundamental questions about the nature of identity, about our ability or inability to consider the changing collections of events, sensations, and thoughts that make up the histories of our bodies and minds as stable, unified selves.

No discussion of the role of memory in Ulysses can begin without our questioning the nature of subjectivity in Joyce's novel and the role of memory in constructing or deconstructing identity. Joyce's writing has been valorized by traditional humanist critics for its reification of consciousness through the stream-of-consciousness technique, for its creation of a modern everyman in Leopold Bloom, ennobled by his connection with the mythic Odysseus, and so on. On the other hand, Joyce's writing is held up by poststructuralist readers as an exemplary site for what Hélène Cixous calls "discrediting the subject" ("Ruse" 15) or Maud Ellmann dubs "disremembering" the subject.

In The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature, Dennis Brown sees Joyce as one of a number of modernist writers whose works break down traditional notions of unified subjectivity. Literary modernism, Brown argues, "was a movement that radically probed the nature of selfhood and problematized the means whereby 'self' could be expressed." In a now-conventional formulation, Brown describes modernist writing as a sort of objective correlative for "the general diffusion of social alienation, the rise of the psychoanalytic movement, the disorientation brought about by the shock of the Great War and the increasing experimentation of almost all the contemporary artistic movements." Social, cultural, and political challenges to traditional notions of coherence and autonomy led to a new sense of the self developing in the work of Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Eliot and others, "a selfhood which is pluralist, heterogeneous and discontinuous" (i). Joyce, of course, was directly affected by the dislocations of World War I, and while living in Zurich and Paris during the years that Ulysses was being composed, he certainly encountered the artistic avant-garde of the time.

Much attention in recent years has focused on the social and cultural construction of subjectivity in Joyce, notably Brandon Kershner's investigations into Joyce's use of popular literature in Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder and Cheryl Herr's examination of the place of Irish popular culture in Joyce's art. Herr articulates her view of the nature of subjectivity in Joyce's work in Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, where she argues that generally in Joyce's texts the subject is constructed, or subjected," from birth to adulthood through the pressure of familial, educational, religious, and political institutions" (25). Joyce's fiction, for Herr, presents the literary character as "a coded ideological construct" (158) or "a collection of institutional attitudes and practices" (80). Despite the inevitable tension of these "various codes, ideologies, and censoring mechanisms" within the fictional subject, however, "the triumph is that warring ideologies are internalized and continue forever in their uneasy juxtaposition within the 'text' of the individual persona" (25; original emphasis).

Our contemporary sense of an unresolvable tension within the subject, our sense that the modern subject is both multiple and historically conditioned, is echoed in the questioning of subjectivity that takes place throughout Joyce's writing, from the fractured psychology and language of "The Sisters" to the fluid personalities of Finnegans Wake. This consciousness of the dissolution or multiplicity of subjectivity may stem generally—as Brown implies—from the conditions of modernity, or more specifically from Joyce's own awareness of his status as a split subject constructed by the opposed discourses of, for example, Roman Catholicism and modern skepticism, the British Empire and Irish nationalism, and so on. Joyce, then, like Stephen Dedalus, was the subject or "servant of two masters" (U1.638). In internalizing these warring discourses, Joyce's texts explore a series of positions on identity, so that Joyce's works in many ways anticipate Paul Smith's description of subjectivity as

a series of overlapping subject-positions which may or may not be present to consciousness at any given moment, but which in any case constitute a person's history. And a person's lived history cannot be abstracted as subjectivity pure and simple, but must be conceived as a colligation of multifarious and multiform subject-positions. (32; original emphasis)

In Discerning the Subject, Smith examines the ways in which recent theories of subjectivity attempt to "dis-cern(e) the subject/individual" (5). Smith plays with the word discern, finding within it two obsolete verbs: to cern and to cerne. The former means "'to accept an inheritance or a patrimony,'" and Smith connects this with the traditional Western philosophical tendency to construe the subject "as the unified and coherent bearer of consciousness." The second term—to cerne—meaning "'to encircle' or 'to enclose,' indicates the way in which theoretical discourse limits the definition of the human agent in order to be able to call him/her the 'subject'" (xxx). These two activities—connecting the self or the subject with a traditional heritage and limiting the concept of the self so that it can be mastered or contained—are the philosophical strategies that Smith seeks to dis-cern(e), to loosen or release, in order "to argue that the human agent exceeds the 'subject' as it is constructed in and by much poststructuralist theory as well as by those discourses against which poststructuralist theory claims to pose itself" (Smith xxx).

This terminology of cerning and discerning the subject can be brought to bear on Joyce's texts in an attempt to articulate the tension between modernist and postmodernist subjectivities that Dennis Brown, Judith Ryan, Cheryl Herr, Maud Ellmann, and others find there and older models of the self or the subject that inhabit the cultural unconscious of a transitional text like Ulysses. Brown argues that "the Modernist discourse of selfhood is haunted by the ghost of some lost self which was once coherent and self-sufficient" (2), and Ulysses is haunted as well by discourses of wholeness, purposiveness, and presence that may inhabit the margins of the text—the cultural unconscious—and yet still exert a shaping influence on the plot, the characters, and the textual operations of the novel. Judith Ryan argues:

With regard to the self, Joyce's Ulysses proposes and explores a series of different conceptions: the self that exists as "ideas and sensations," the self that finds its continuity in memory, the self that moves towards a predetermined goal ("entelechy"), the transforming self of metempsychosis, the self of "hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism" ..., the self of the author that projects itself as a literary character (as in Shakespeare's Hamlet), the self that is passed down from father to son, the self that exists only by virtue of a name (the mysterious "Mcintosh" of Paddy Dignam's funeral), the self divided into its component senses ("Miss voice of Kennedy" and "Miss gaze of Kennedy" ...). All these are playfully suggested in the course of the novel. Joyce makes it clear that he has been following the debates about the self but that he is not fully prepared to settle for any one "solution." The ground of Joyce's novel is constantly shifting, and even its most ambitious mythic structures, the fundamental patterns that hold it together, are subject at one moment or another to ironic distancing and internal self-parody. (149)

We encounter the urgency of establishing a sense of identity on the first page of A Portrait, when the infant Stephen, hearing his father read a story about "Baby Tuckoo," thinks,

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: She sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe botheth. (P 7)

As Hugh Kenner and others have shown, the infant artist begins at once to form—or to cern(e), in Paul Smith's terms—a self out of his sensations (every sense is involved in these early perceptions), using the artist's power to appropriate sense data to "rewrite" the details of experience. As Kenner points out in "The Portrait in Perspective," "By changing the red rose to a green and dislocating the spelling, he makes the song his own" (34). By acting upon experience, by making it "his own," Stephen begins at once to distinguish himself from the world.

The reader follows Stephen's attempts to define himself throughout A Portrait as he experiments with the roles of sensualist, of religious devotee, and so on, finally settling on the persona of the artist as the most appropriate. However, despite Stephen's attempts to cern(e) a self, to construct a stable sense of himself and his place in the world in response to the roles, personae, or "voices" that he encounters in the world, the reader sees rather a series of selves, a sequence of attempts to secure himself in one or another orientation—social, sexual, religious, artistic—and we have no reason to believe that Stephen's stridently self-confident position as a self-proclaimed artist at the end of A Portrait is as permanent, stable, or functional as Stephen seems to believe it is. In his early essay "A Portrait of the Artist/' written in 1904, Joyce describes the young boy who serves as an early model for the Stephen of Stephen Hero and A Portrait as subject to "continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards" (P 258). Joyce intimates that these repeated shocks bring about a "crisis" of personality or identity and that in response "the eñigma of a manner was put up at all corners to protect the crisis" (P 258). Strangely, the wording here suggests that "the enigma of a manner," which we can take as the representation of a unified subjectivity to oneself and the world, does not protect the artist from the crisis, but rather protects the crisis itself, implying perhaps that the best the subject can hope to achieve is a cordoning off or repression—a cerning, in Paul Smith's terms—of the crisis of identity. This crisis of identity is central to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and, despite the reader's suspicion that "the enigma of a manner" may simply cover rather than solve a crisis of identity, Stephen seems to feel by the end of the novel that he has "found" himself as an artist. By constructing and investing himself in a personal mythology of the artist as priestlike and powerful, Stephen temporarily finds solid ground in a seemingly stable, seemingly permanent identity. He views himself as both formed and transformed by his choice of vocation, as he indicates in conversation with Cranly, when he dissociates himself from the religion of his youth by claiming "I was someone else then.... I was not myself as I am now, as I had to become" (P 240). We may suspect, however (as Stephen apparently does not at the end of A Portrait), that Stephen's problems in constructing a self cannot be solved through a simple choice of vocation. Joyce's novel constantly and ironically undercuts Stephen's exhilaration and sense of certainty, even in the last lines of the book, where Stephen unwittingly identifies himself with Icarus rather than with Daedalus as he prepares to "fly" into exile.

While A Portrait may seem superficially to validate the strong sense of self-presence and sureness of identity that Stephen feels at the end of the book, in Ulysses anxieties about the solidity of personal identity, about the possibility of positing and believing in a stable "self" that underlies time and change, are more insistent and tenacious. In A Portrait, the phrase Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis (P 94) leaves no impression on Stephen except perhaps as another proof of the tediousness of his father's Cork friends (one of whom quizzes him with this line to test his Latin), but by the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses the notion that "Times change and we change with them" has become a recurrent problem that Stephen must once again set to rest. By June 16, 1904, of course, Stephen has been forced to realize that he has not become the soaring Daedalian artist which he thought he would become at the end of A Portrait; he is, in fact, Icarus, who soared too high and fell: "Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater, ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing be" (U9.952–54).

The Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses takes up the issue of Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis with obsessive interest, realizing now that he who can say "I was someone else then" cannot necessarily lay any certain claim to a constancy of self in the present or the future. The motif of the "other me" runs throughout the early chapters of Ulysses, occurring not only to Stephen but also to Leopold Bloom, who thinks, as he reminisces on his past life with Molly: "I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I?" (U 8.608).

This motif in Ulysses calls the nature of personal identity into question, so that we may be led to agree with Maud Ellmann's conclusion regarding A Portrait that identity is "a scar without an author, without an origin, and at last, without even a name. And this identity is a wound that constantly reopens" (191). For Ellmann, identity is a "process" of reopening and rehealing the scar of identity, a process of brisure—of" cleaving" and "joining"—that "belongs not only to the subject but to the text itself, which both suffers and enacts the mutilation by which identity reconstitutes itself.... Once named and maimed, the subject, rather than a plenitude, erupts henceforth as punctuation, as a gap or wound that rips the fabric of the text at irregular intervals" (192).

Ellmann recalls a phrase of Davin's from A Portrait when she labels this process of brisure in the novel "Disremembering Dedalus." We must also remember, however, to avoid the temptation to view Joyce's writing as ultimately or only disrupted and fragmentary; we must insist on maintaining the uneasy balance implied in terms such as Eco's "chaosmos" between centrifugal and centripetal forces. The formation of identity in A Portrait and Ulysses, then, occurs within a tension between the "disremembering" or dissolution of the self and the re-membering that seeks continually to shore up the fragments of experience into a coherent and purposive narrative. In much the same way, it has been argued by Karen Lawrence and others, the text itself constructs a normative style, or "Rock of Ithaca," or "initial style," in the first six chapters, which is then dissolved and reassembled in later episodes. Remembering is one tool that the Joycean subject uses to pull things together, to "protect the crisis" of identity, attempting to create a narrative of wholeness or integrity. In Ulysses, memory is the central thread of the cultural and textual unconscious, one that intertwines with teleological notions of destiny and entelechy to become a proleptic, dynamic force struggling to connect past and future into a coherent narrative of the self. Thus, Herr finds within the cultural unconscious of Ulysses "the summoning up of an unknown sphere of inevitability and instinct, which appears to counter the recurrently asserted constructedness of all conditioning forces and the reflexively self-contained quality of Ulysses" ("Art" 28). In Joyce's transitional text we find both a modern awareness of the instability of personal identity and a nostalgic longing for unified and purposive experience, indeed, the forces of fragmentation and disruption at work in the novel do much to stimulate a reaction in the text that taps into the cultural unconscious to provide a holistic response, a suturing of these gaps in unity and identity.

This conflict between centrifugal and centripetal currents—between a textual "conscious" or surface that foregrounds the dissolution of self in linguistic and stylistic experimentation and a textual or cultural unconscious that preserves the desire for wholeness—is represented in the conflict between various models of mind and memory that supply the paradigms which Joyce uses to construct the "mimesis of consciousness" that John Paul Riquelme has found in Ulysses. In Ulysses we hear the echoes of the many philosophies or models of mind that Joyce encountered in his eclectic reading, in his conversations with friends and acquaintances, or, more generally, in the cultural assumptions that constructed his own position as a writer. These models of memory form a central part of the cultural unconscious, in Herr's terms, that exists in tension with what Maud Ellmann calls the "disremembering" tendencies in Ulysses.

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Excerpted from Joyce's Book of Memory by John S. Rickard. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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