"Famished Ghosts": Famine Memory in James Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i>

Abstract

"Famished Ghosts":Famine Memory in James Joyce's Ulysses Julieann Ulin (bio) Numerous critics of James Joyce have pointed out the apparent absence of the Famine in his work. Noting that he was only one generation removed from the catastrophe, they have used this proximity to support claims that the enormity of the Famine drove many Irish writers into silence. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Terry Eagleton asks, "Where is the Famine in the literature of the Revival? Where is it in Joyce?"1 He goes on to suggest that "If the Famine stirred some to angry rhetoric, it would seem to have traumatized others into muteness. The event strains at the limit of the articulable, and is truly in this sense an Irish Auschwitz." Colm Toibin, in his Irish Famine: A Documentary, writes that the pre-modern quality of the Famine "puts [it] beyond the reach of writers who came after it; and the speed with which society transformed itself—and perhaps the arrival of the camera—made the history of 1846, 1847 and 1848 in Ireland a set of erasures rather than a set of reminders."2 While Eagleton's question has elicited several answers, these have tended to focus on Joyce's Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and to ignore Ulysses. In his essay, "The Memories of 'The Dead,'" Kevin Whelan argues that Joyce's work, "beneath its calm surface, is pervasively disturbed by the presence of the Famine: The post-Famine condition of Ireland is the unnamed horror at the heart of Joyce's Irish darkness, the conspicuous exclusion that is saturatingly present as a palpable absence deliberately being held at bay, 'the terror of soul of a starving Irish village.'"3 Luke Gibbons has argued that in Joyce's Dublin, memory makes up a phantom public sphere that cannot be contained within the Irish home. Having been dealt a series of concussive shocks by public history and political memory, and with "no homes to go to," these energies live in the halfway houses of the pub or in the streetwalking culture [End Page 20] and exist as a somatic memory that the body carries around. Gibbons discusses this chiefly in terms of the paralysis of Joyce's Dubliners, which he links directly to the Famine: "In the eyes of many observers, the devastation wrought upon Irish society both during and after the Famine was such that the entire culture seemed reduced to the kind of enervation associated with hysteria, what became known as 'the great silence.'"4 With the exception of the first chapter of Mary Lowe-Evans's Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control (Syracuse 1989), the Famine in Ulysses had not been considered at length at all.5 Then, in 2006, Hungry Words: Image of Famine in the Irish Canon (Irish Academic Press) offered a long overdue analysis of the Famine's iconography in writers such as Yeats, Synge, Edgeworth, and Beckett, claiming the catastrophe operated as a textual presence rather than as an absence. The volume included a chapter by Bonnie Roos entitled "The Joyce of Eating: feast, famine and the humble potato in Ulysses," which offers a succinct look at the "Nestor" episode, as well as the shriveled potato Bloom carries in his pocket. This new direction has opened a space for a comprehensive look at the Famine in Joyce's Ulysses. The Famine is present to a far greater extent in this novel than in Joyce's earlier work, emerging in iconography and the somatic memories of the characters as well as through direct reference. In his careful incorporation of popular historical accounts of the Famine as source material, Joyce crafts a text in which, far from existing as what Whelan terms an "exclusion" or a "palpable absence," the memory of the Famine operates centrally to delineate a boundary between cultural insider and outsider. In Joyce's lifetime, questions of Irish memory and history received significant attention,6 and Joyce's own evolving interest in Irish history should not be overlooked. In 1907, Thomas Kettle had criticized Joyce's Chamber Music for showing no knowledge of folk traditions. In the review, Kettle...