Scarce More a Corpse:Famine Memory and Representations of the Gothic inUlysses

Abstract

## V A U hat is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who M m m m has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, W lf through of manners (?79.147-149). According to Ste? phen Dedalus' definition of the ghost in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter of Ulysses, anyone living out-of-time(even due to something as seemingly inconsequential as a change in manners) can be incorporated into ghostliness. Central to this understanding ofthe ghost is the provision that the ghost need not have died before returning in spectral form. Indeed, throughout Ulysses the lines between living and dead are blurred, and the paralysis which Joyce identi? fies at the core of Ireland has the peculiar effect of transforming the characters into ghosts, trapped between life and death. The state of living death caused by the paralysis at the heart of Irish life means that Ireland is a place where the living and the dead indistinguishably haunt the streets and interiors, the fields and tombs. Ireland is a country populated by ghosts. Joyce's use of the Gothic as a mode of expression, available to comment upon a situation engendered out of deep and repeated trauma, develops, I believe, out of his reading of earlier writers who adapted Gothic techniques to their own ends. Any reading of Joyce's Gothic must therefore look to Joyce's predecessors as the starting point, the omphalos of the Joycean Gothic. In particular, the nineteenth century poet James Clarence Mangan wrote ofthe effects ofthe Great Famine in terms ofthe living dead. Joyce had more than a casual interest in Mangan's writing, for he wrote several lectures upon Mangan, focusing on the notion ofthe poet as a symbol ofthe nation. In these lectures, Joyce simultaneously praises and condemns the poet, revealing a nuanced understanding of Mangan's verse which he puts to greater use in portraying