engleski

The Genre of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and Autobiographical Memory

The generic hybridity of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' has often been taken for granted and his work has been placed under the rubric of autobiography. Therefore, to state that 'Ulysses' is autofictional wouldn't be something new. However, the complex dynamics underlying its autobiographical mode has seldom been thoroughly examined in relation to other genres that the work accommodates, let alone problematized. My contention is that new light can be shed on 'Ulysses' and its relation to autobiography if we focus on the issue of memory. In his seminal study on «The Genre of Ulysses» A. Walton Litz examines the «rewards and dangers, of reading 'Ulysses' with a particular view of the novel as a form constantly in mind». Indeed, in the long process of writing 'Ulysses' Joyce seldom called it a novel ; in his famous letter to Italian translator Carlo Linati he referred to 'Ulysses' as «an epic of two races (Israelite- Irish) and at the same time the cycle of human body as well as a little story of a day (life)» (21 September 1920). While conceiving life as narrative, Joyce in fact seeks for an alternative genre, that could constitute a modern epic and reconcile the individual and collective, the story of the self and the story of the nation. This paper departs from the assumption that the burgeoning field of memory studies could give new insights into the traditional theoretical frameworks dealing with genre and narrative. Joyce's Ulysses features through the plurality of memories, often rendered in figures and sites of memory as well as various counter-narratives and counter- memories. The collective memory of Ireland in Ulysses features as a complex and multilayered dynamics of representative modes and contingent mnemonic traces within a wider, encyclopaedic space of cultural memory. My paper will consider the convergence between the historical and the personal at the intersection of various mnemonic modes ; it will particularly focus on the controversial status of autobiographical memory in Ulysses and problematize it in relation to the concepts of autobiography and autofiction. In line with Philippe Lejeune's considerations of autofiction, it will address the question whether autoficition can house autobiographical memory at all and what consequences does this question bear on the genre of Ulysses.

James Joyce, ‘Uylsses’, autobiography, genric hybridity, autobiographical memory

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