On Ulysses: Joyce’s Book of Memory [P1]

Part 1 —

Introduction: A Mnemotechnical Approach to Ulysses

Ulysses is an epic written from memory. The city of Dublin it depicts is a Dublin created from the mind of its author, James Joyce, and the fabled June day that it preserves depends wholly on the power and the detail of what he remembers. The novel is a “retrospective arrangement” that binds Joyce’s recollections, scraps of marginalia mailed by relatives during his lifelong exile, and the ever growing legacy of art. By writing Ulysses, Joyce protects the precious halcyon day of his first date with Nora Barnacle, a day that Kevin Birmingham describes as a mere “fractal of Western Civilization,” from the wearing effects of history (Birmingham 2014, 69).

I will argue that Ulysses is an attempt to reify the value of personal and collective memory. Joyce, echoing Giambattista Vico, told Frank Budgen that “imagination was memory” (Budgen 1970, 187), implying that art simultaneously engages the past of its creator, the sociohistorical context that it was created in, and the cumulative efforts of all art that preceded it. It was Joyce’s struggle to represent memory, in all the complexities and absurdities that mark conscious experience, that allowed him to arrive at the universal problems of heroism, identity, and alienation that characterized Modernism.

My analysis focuses on how Joyce’s narratological language and content uses memory to develop the primary characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly…