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The Politics of Memory in Joyce's Novels

A growing number of postcolonial and historicist readings of Joyce over the last three decades shed some new light on the intricate cultural and political dynamics of his novels. These readings have only recently been intertwined with the interpretative paradigms of cultural memory studies. Drawing upon them my paper will attempt to analyse the politics of memory in Joyce's novels. My paper argues that Joyce's novels stage a «twilight zone» formed at the intersection between history and memory. According to Eric J. Hobsbawm «for all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory ; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one's own life. (…) this is true not only of individuals, but of societies» (1989:3). This in-between “zone” in Joyce's novels is enacted by various modes of memory: autobiographical/personal, collective and cultural. The twilight zone of Ireland at the turn of the last century reflected in his novels, therefore, invites us to explore the relations between history, memory and textuality. The semantic interplay of these relations generates figures of memory. Since these figures are situated in the liminal semantic space of the «twilight zone» they are engaged in the process of «infinite semiosis» that manipulates the production of definite meaning, which reflects on the negotiation of their symbolic empowerment. My paper will attempt to explore the semiotic underpinnings of memories and commemorative practices of the two major centenaries inscribed in the «twilight zone» of Joyce's novels, i.e. the centenary of Robert Emmet's death (1903) and the centenary of the United Irishmen Rebellion (1898). The figures of memory will be explored in their relation to text, space and body. Although the paper takes into consideration all his novels, it will particularly examine the inscriptions of memory in the subtexts of Ulysses, e.g. Emmet's celebrated «Speech from the Dock» and the politics of memory underlying the controversies about Emmet's disputed grave and his displaced body as reflected in the novel. The analysis of the figures of memory will also take into consideration the fact that in Joyce’s novels the discourses of romantic nationalism fostered by the fiction of nostalgia and linked to the organicist and essentialist conception of national identity are continuously obstructed by various interpolations of counter-memory. This, in turn, results in the mapping of an incongruent and politicised landscape of memory in his novels in which Irish cultural memory plays a significant role.

James Joyce, figures of memory, history and memory, cultural memory, memory studies

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