Reading the City: Cultural Memory and the Representation of Colonial Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Abstract

Abstract: James Joyce once claimed that his Ulysses (1922) could serve as a basis for a future rebuilding of Dublin. The irony in this regard is that Dublin did indeed irrevocably change during the period he was writing the book. Besides the natural changes a city undergoes in two decades, the Irish struggle for independence during which large parts of the city center were shelled to rubble contributed to the fact that the Dublin Joyce knew had largely disappeared by 1922. With this in mind, I read Ulysses as a site of memory and investigate the role cultural memory plays in the way Dublin is depicted in the novel. There are three ways in which memory is significant in this context. First, rendering his characters’ stream of consciousnesses as they make their ways through Dublin, Joyce’s psychological realism offers, among other things, a literary representation of individual memory. Second, this literary Dublin is a remembered city, based on the recollections and imagination of both Joyce, who had left it years before writing his novel, and the readers who are required to fill numerous gaps and blanks in the vague and unspecific depiction of the cityscape. Third, the novel serves as a mnemonic device that shapes the collective memory of turn-of-the-century Dublin. Regarding the shape and meaning of this remembered Dublin, I will focus on its representation as a colonial city and the ways the political situation is inscribed in the text.