Dreaming of Palestine: James Joyce's Ulysses and Plantation Modernism

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Dreaming of Palestine:James Joyce's Ulysses and Plantation Modernism Amy Clukey (bio) Agendath Netaim: planters' company. To purchase wastesandy tracks from Turkish government and plant witheucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north ofJaffa. You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam ofland for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons.Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation. Everyyear you get a sending of the crop. Your name enteredfor life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay tendown and the balance in yearly installments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15. —James Joyce, Ulysses1 The plantation has long been central to conceptions of Caribbean and southern US literature, but it is rarely considered in relation to European and American modernism.2 Modernist fiction that depicts urbane cosmopolitanism, bohemian revelry, and flânerie may seem far from Haitian sugarcane fields and Georgian cotton estates, except perhaps in the most indirect of ways: if colonialism enables European modernity, then those scattered colonies provide raw materials for commodity production, which in turn generates the cosmopolitan culture of metropoles. On closer inspection, however, the plantation is not the exclusive purview of modernists from the peripheralized West Indies or US South like Jean Rhys, William Faulkner, or Eric Walrond. Plantation fiction is, in fact, a significant genre of global modernism, and the plantation haunts metropolitan literatures as surely [End Page 167] as it does the supposedly regional literatures of the Caribbean, southern, and Harlem renaissances of the early to mid-twentieth century. Metropolitan novels like Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) present the colonial periphery at the imperial core where the plantation irrupts into the streets of Boston, London, and Dublin. Such instances provides insistent—if frequently unrecognized—reminders that these urban centers are shaped by plantation colonialism, agriculture, labor, culture, and ideology. Joyce's work has been thoroughly examined from postcolonial perspectives, including its influence on West Indian writers like Derek Walcott.3 Such criticism does not explicitly consider Joyce's fiction in relation to transnational, national, or regional plantation cultures. I read Ulysses as a case study for plantation modernism to show that plantation culture undergirds a vast range of modern and modernist cultural production in Europe itself. Situating Joyce within a network of plantation modernists brings him into dialogue with a range of both metropolitan and colonial writers in ways that go beyond implicitly hierarchical models of influence. My comparative plantation framework puts Joyce on equal footing with writers from throughout the global plantation complex to reveal shared aesthetic and political concerns at work in his fiction. Within this context, Stephen Dedalus's famous declaration "History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" resonates with Faulkner's assertion that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" and Rhys's statement that "the past exists—side by side—with the present, not behind it; that what was—is" (Joyce, Ulysses, 28).4 Like his contemporaries Rhys, Faulkner, and Walrond, Joyce interrogates narratives of the plantation constructed by previous generations of writers. This literature includes early official histories of plantation colonialism from metropolitan perspectives like Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (1633) and Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry's history of Saint Domingue (1789). It also includes nineteenth-century romances like Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), William Earle's Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800), Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal (1826), and Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia (1887). Much of this early literature adopts planter perspectives to legitimate colonialism and the African slave trade in the New World; it constructs deceptively linear narratives that obscure the violent gaps and silences that constitute plantation culture. Modernist writers inherited the ideological and aesthetic legacies of plantation literature, and, as I discuss, they grapple with the representational challenges it presents. Modernism limns the plantation past, maps its present, and imagines its future. In Tropic Death (1926), Walrond compiles ten stories about the United States–occupied...