Famine Memory Research Articles

Preface

Preface Philip Sicker and Moshe Gold Two of the incisive essays in this 2011 volume of Joyce Studies Annual might be said to illustrate Wolfgang Iser's observation that "indeterminacy is the fundamental precondition for reader participation." However, as Kimberley Devlin demonstrates in "Rereading Ulysses: Indeterminacy, Error and Fixing the Past," the hermeneutic scrutiny that Joyce's novel demands often leads interpreters to resolve textual gaps "without acknowledging readerly inference." Citing Bloom's familiar thought, "Could never like it again after Rudy," Devlin notes that the statement lacks an identified subject (she, I, or we) and turns ambiguously on the unspecified pronoun "it." How readers fill in these absences shapes their understanding of the extent to which Bloom and Molly have suspended sexual relations after Rudy's death and which partner is to blame for weakening their relationship. Devlin demonstrates that these unresolved questions of cause and effect are compounded by inconsistencies in Joyce's calculation of ages, dates, and places of residence. In particular, conflicting references to the couple's succession of lodgings in Dublin between 1893 and 1895 only deepen confusions about precisely when and why the Blooms' marriage began to unravel. Given this unreliable fictive data, Devlin cautions against "fixing the past" in Ulysses too insistently and reminds us that "some textual indeterminacy will remain in the land of speculation—an intriguing albeit labyrinthine place to visit." J. Stephen Murphy illuminates another source of textual incertitude in his genetic study "How Geen Is the Portrait: Joyce, Passive Revision, and the History of Modernism," which focuses on Joyce's curious failure, in reviewing the Portrait typescript, to restore the word "geen" (Stephen's lisping mispronunciation on the first page) in place of the apparent misprint "green." Murphy argues that Hans Walter Gabler's restoration of the fair copy manuscript "geen" in his 1993 edition reflects a misunderstanding of Joyce's changing approach to revision. Challenging the conventional "centripetal" idea of modernist revision, advanced by Flaubert, [End Page ix] Pater, and Pound, as the scrupulous reduction of language to some formal essence by an author-god, Murphy contends that in transforming Stephen Hero into Portrait, Joyce cast off this aesthetic along with the Stephen Dedalus who embraces it. In the process, Joyce discovered an alternative "centrifugal" approach to revision that would characterize his later work on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, one that regards texts as "palimpsestic," dynamic, and contingent and that eschews the formalist ideal of authorial control. In allowing "green" to stand in the published text, Murphy suggests, Joyce practiced a creative form of "passive revision," one that implicitly recognizes that literary texts contain no enduring formal structures and that "they can emerge at any moment in new forms." While revision and rereading both enrich and destabilize Joycean texts, Julieann Ulin's provocative study of "Famine memory" in Ulysses, "Famished Ghosts," reveals that there are still important allusive patterns in the novel that generations of readers have overlooked. Just six decades after the Famine, the Dubliners of 1904 are haunted by both personal and cultural recollections of the catastrophe, and Joyce repeatedly invokes the years of starvation, paralysis, and homelessness through iconography preserved by its witnesses and their descendants. The Famine asserts its terrible legacy most powerfully, Ulin suggests, in the Irish burial fetishes on display in "Hades." The mourners' insistence on elaborately ritualized funerals serves as a defense against traumatic memories of the Great Hunger: flimsy coffins overturning or breaking open, exposed bodies in mass graves, cannibalism, and "the desecration of the dead by dogs and rats" (evoked in Stephen's image of the ravaging fox). Bloom, as an outsider who has not directly inherited these cultural anxieties, can contemplate the decay of corpses without recourse to the historical and political nightmare that so afflicts Powers, Cunningham, and Simon Dedalus; and his well-intentioned suggestions for more efficient and sanitary funerary practices are registered as an "offense" to Famine memory. Yet, as Ulin notes, Bloom's potato, given by his Irish mother, is a talismanic reminder of the Famine that he tries to fathom, and his "Circe" fantasy of saving hungry, evicted tenants reflects his desire both to participate in collective memory and to atone for his...

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

"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...

Sara Ruddick's Theory of Maternal Thinking Applied To Traditional Irish Mothering

This paper uses Sara Ruddick's theory of maternal thinking to explain patterns of Irish mothering that developed in Ireland following the Great Famine of 1845-1852. Ruddick's central thesis, that maternal thinking develops strategies for preserving the life of the child, fostering the child's growth, and shaping an acceptable child, is applied to the intersecting influences of famine memory, religion, education, and emigration in post-famine Ireland. The strict, moralistic, and highly inhibiting features of Irish culture that dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are traceable to patterns of mothering that developed after the famine. While Irish mothers are often blamed for instilling values that stressed sexual repression and guilt, other cultural factors influenced maternal thinking. Mothers did foster highly repressive moral values that encouraged permanent celibacy and delayed marriage. This paper examines the larger cultural features that derived from political oppression and the famine as they imprinted these values.

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

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

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

## 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

History and Memory in Modern Ireland

1. Introduction: memory and national identity in modern Ireland Ian McBride 2. Martyrdom and memory in the seventeenth century Alan Ford 3. Remembering 1798 Roy Foster 4. Famine memory and the popular representation of scarcity Niall O Ciosain 5. The star-spangled shamrock: memory and meaning in Irish America Kevin O'Neill 6. 'Where Wolfe Tone's statue was not': Joyce, monuments and memory Luke Gibbons 7. 'For God and for Ulster': the Ulstermen on the Somme David Officer 8. Commemoration in the Irish Free State: a chronicle of embarrassment David Fitzpatrick 9. Monument and trauma: varieties of remembrance Joep Leerssen 10. Northern Ireland: commemoration, elegy, forgetting Edna Longley 11. 'No lack of ghosts': memory, commemoration and the state in Ireland D. George Boyce.

The Irish Famine in American School Curricula

EXAMINING how people remember the past has become for historians as important as analyzing the events on which those collective memories are based. (1) On one level, the trend extends the established method of intradisciplinary self-critique known as historiography to a parallel study of changing opinions over time among the consumers, rather than the producers, of historical knowledge. On another, it exemplifies the epistemological doubts of the late-twentieth century that scholars can create histories that are accurate in any positivistic sense. What lasting role the history of memory may have in the discipline of history cannot yet be discerned. It has at least underlined how important, in any given era, the popular memory of the past is to current political discourse. It has also shown that the relationship between memory and discourse is two-way rather than one-way, and that the shaping of memory is partly a political process. Fifty-year anniversaries and their multiples tend to be important moments in the reshaping of memories, and the sesquicentennial of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52 has generated an interesting opportunity to observe a contemporary example of the phenomenon. (2) The reshaping has reflected historians' updated judgments about the famine. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of scholars undercut the interpretation that the famine had been a natural calamity severely aggravated by unwise social and economic practices among the Irish people. (3) With much greater nuance, they again made central to the catastrophe stories about the inadequacies and even hard-heartedness of Britain's response to the Irish crisis. Of course, the stance of the revisionist historians whom they criticized had been a reaction to older, nationalist arguments that had made the famine primarily the product of conscious English policy. (4) The sesquicentennial of the Great Famine also took on special importance on account of the contemporary political contexts in which it occurred. How society observed the famine had implications for various groups involved in the Northern Ireland debate. Hard-line nationalists could use evidence of mean-spirited English behavior in the famine era as an indication of English perfidy and modern English denials of responsibility as reason for distrusting today's British government. From the English point of view, the advantages of viewing themselves as helpless bystanders inevitably blamed for misfortunes that the Irish brought on themselves were equally obvious. In the United States, the famine commemoration occurred in an era characterized by revived expressions of ethnicity and perceptions among cultural groups that they must consciously protect the presentation of their heritages in the history of the nation. For Irish Americans from backgrounds that might be included under the umbrella terms of Catholic or nationalist, it was an opportunity to present an alternative depiction to that which portrayed them as racist adjuncts to the dominant culture. (5) Although they would reject politicized charges that they were claiming victimhood, remembering the famine allowed Irish Americans to remind the nation of their initial pariah status and prolonged period of assimilation. Given the broader cultural context of the United States in the late-twentieth century, efforts to create a niche for the famine in the American memory not surprisingly included techniques developed in the preceding generation by African Americans eager to establish their share of the nation's history and by Jews anxious lest the lessons of World War II be forgotten. Whether or not the Irish enjoyed the irony in their use of tactics associated with their ethnic competitors is not clear. Some in those other groups, especially among the Jews, definitely did not enjoy it. One key element of the Irish-American initiative to create a famine memory in the United States was a campaign to include instruction about it in the curricula of several school systems, especially in states with large Irish or Irish-ancestral populations. …

Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security Discourse

The sense of enhanced generated at least in some Northern countries by the events of 1989 was dissipated, in part, by the war in the Gulf. Although other military threats once again loomed on the political horizon, the slightly more distant memories of famine in Ethiopia and the blistering drought of the summer of 1988 in North America have not faded entirely. Concerns about the greenhouse effect and pollution remain, albeit now in slightly reduced media prominence. Fears of a global economic recession also undermined feelings of in Western states in the late 1980s. The old threat of Soviet attack may not be credible any longer, except to some of the nuclear strategists in the RAND Corporation or in the Pentagon, but there remains widespread unease about the future. The haste with which the US administration went to war in the Gulf, and provided liberal intellectual justifications for so doing, gave pause to most who argued that the age of peace had come with the end of the Cold War.1 Security remains out of reach, it seems. But, interestingly, the term itself also still appears to be extremely difficult to clearly conceptualize. The term is used frequently; it is the preoccupation of hordes of specialists, the security who formulate policy, study international politics, and pontificate on the television screens of an anxious world.2 Despite, or perhaps more accurately because of, the frequency of its use, the term is inherently ambiguous. Particularly in its usage as national security, its meaning is both taken for granted and imprecise; its flexibility is a virtue in the academic and political circles of the analysts, intellectuals, and policymakers.3