engleski

Forging Cultural Memory in Joyce's Ulysses: Negotiating Ireland as Textual Unconscious

FORGING CULTURAL MEMORY IN JOYCE'S ULYSSES: NEGOTIATING IRELAND AS TEXTUAL UNCONSCIOUS My paper seeks to contribute to the timely debate about the role of memory as a key concept in the overall understanding of Joyce's novels. As it has often been pointed out (e.g. Rickard, Piette, Parrinder, etc.) there are several modes of memory in James Joyce's Ulysses: personal, autobiographical, collective, textual, etc. Their mnemonic mechanisms are interrelated and cultural memory, my paper argues, is to a great extent encoded in their dynamic intersections echoing an atavistic voice of the past underlying the transmission of culture and history as a mode of preserving identity through time. When Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man sets out 'to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race' he embarked on an ambitious task to articulate the innate yet unshaped essence of the Irish identity conceiving his own soul as a mediator by which the identity of his race should be preserved offering, therefore, himself as an agent of memorial transmission. Stephen's resistance in Ulysses to deal with Irish history cognitively situates its pervasive ghostly presence in the liminal domain of spiritual and aesthetic. Therefore, Stephen's continuous dialogue with Irish culture and Irish history in Ulysses enacted with repressed memories is an after effect of his postponed cognition which seeks substitute in his overt subversion of the dominant discourses of Ireland, and intensifies the experience of Ireland in the novel as a disembodied presence. On the other hand, Bloom defines mnemotechnics as 'the capacity which a living organism possesses for retaining after-effects of experience or stimulation undergone by itself or its progenitors'. Both Stephen’s and Bloom’s notion and practice of memory imply an arcane identification of the individual with the collective experience and engage the body as a mediator in the intersubjective transmission of memory. Since this identification fails on the cognitive level the boundaries of individual and collective conscience decoalesce and materialize in the text enacted in textual unconscious. When putting forward the initial arguments relevant for the location of this shift from individual to collective memories in the novel my paper will draw on two opposed theories of memory, that of Henri Bergson and Maurice Halbwachs. Joyce was well acquainted with Bergson's ideas since he read his works while composing Ulysses in Trieste (as his Trieste library demonstrates) along with some other authors e.g. Vico and Freud, who also influenced his understanding of memory. It needs to be pointed out that Joyce at that time also encountered and absorbed the idea of memory located outside one's personal experience, 'metapersonal memory, ' which was a part of the Zeitgeist in the turn-of-the century Europe. As opposed to Bergson, Halbwachs’s theory of memory shifts knowledge out of a biological framework into a cultural one. Joyce couldn't be acquainted with his work, since it gained recognition only recently, but my paper attempts to argue that Joyce identified the need to locate this shift in Ulysses. Discussing some examples from the novel my paper will show how this tension between the individual and the collective memories is embodied in it and projected into the textual level forging cultural memory in Ulysses by negotiating Ireland as textual unconscious. JOYCE, CULTURE, MEMORY: NEW AND OLD PERSPECTIVES- PANEL/SEMINAR -CONTENT-This panel invited papers related to various cultural and multicultural aspects in Joyce's works ; cultural criticism and Joyce ; intersecting cultural discourses in Joyce's works ; history and memory ; representation of Irishness in Joyce ; (de) constructing Irish identity in Joyce ; Joyce and Orientalism ; cultural memory ; lieu de memoire in Joyce's works ; commemoration in Joyce ; Joyce and (Irish) cultural studies, and other topics, as well as comparative approaches related to culture and memory in Joyce's works.

James Joyce; Ulysses; cultural memory

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