The writer James Joyce and the philosopher Henri Bergson both died in January 1941. Aside from the timing of their deaths, these thinkers were connected by their influence on the Modernist conception of memory and its relation to everyday, conscious experience. In Ulysses, Joyce innovated the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, which Patrick Hogan defines as an integration of interior monologue with “parallel processes of perception” including emotions, semantic associations, and memories (Hogan 2014, 108). Similarly, Bergson critiques the traditional spatial view of memory and time, favoring a formulation of memory modeled after his theory of Duration in Matter and Memory.
By discussing memory representation, this essay seeks to use Bergson’s ideas to better understand the literary style of Ulysses. I will begin by outlining the primary thesis of Matter and Memory’s second chapter: that there are two forms of memory retrieval, voluntary and habitual, that obscure our relationship with “pure” or “spontaneous” memory. Joyce uses these forms to shape his characters’ inner lives, and I will discuss how they manifest in Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, respectively, in the first half of Ulysses. My purpose is not to causally link the writings of Bergson and Joyce, as Wyndham Lewis did when he wrote that Bergson had planted “the little seed” that created…
