Moving Beyond the Famine: Joyce, Emigration, and Imagining a New Community in "Penelope"

It is curious that even when emigration is not the subject of Molly's contemplation, many of her thoughts and reminiscences abound with the collective memory of emigration in the "Penelope" episode of Ulysses. One prominent example is when Molly recalls a day after her friends departed from Gibraltar:

… after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out of it somewhere were never easy where we are father or aunt or marriage waiting always waiting to guiiiide him toooo me waiting nor speeeed his flying feet …

(U 18.676–79)

Molly's thoughts surrounding this passage are full of the sea and of those who embark on voyages to new lands, remaining as vestiges in words and phrases such as "seasick," "goodbye," "voyage," and "landed off the ship" (U 18.671, 674, 675, 683). Entangled in these thoughts of departures are a blend of sorrowful and hopeful emotions. She recalls, "didnt I cry yes I believe I did or near it my lips were taittering when I said goodbye," while "waiting always waiting to guiiiide him toooo me waiting" (U 18.678–79). Molly's pang at parting expands to those who have had to part from family or friends, who she embraces as "we," whether it be a "father or [an] aunt" or a spouse (U 18.677–78). Curiously, Molly's memory in the passage contains more than her own personal experiences; not infrequently in her monologue such generalized recollections illuminate a subtle but crucial link between Joyce's Ulysses and the Great Famine (1845–49).

Joyce's engagement with the Famine has been examined by a number of critics. Mary Lowe-Evans was one of the first in Joyce studies to acknowledge the presence of the Famine. She examines the ways in which Joyce's texts are tied to and produced out of the debate over population control. At the center of this debate was the issue of emigration.¹ Preoccupied with the issue, Joyce speaks up forthrightly for emigration in his political essays (Lowe-Evans 32–33). More subtly, his early works such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also evince his psychological "need to defend his decision" for emigration (Lowe-Evans 36). Yet Lowe-Evans's analysis on emigration is limited to the works written not long after Joyce's departure from Ireland, as she sees his "emigrationist attitude" largely as a product of his own psychological struggle (Lowe-Evans 23). However, Joyce was more deeply and complexly engaged with the issue of emigration throughout his career. More recent articles follow Lowe-Evans's footsteps in exploring the presence of the Famine in Joyce's works.² However, none of them deals with the trauma of the Famine in relation to the emigration and its aftermath. In her study of trauma in narrative and history, Cathy Caruth discusses Tancred's story in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where "a human voice … cries out from the wound."³ The voice is from Tancred's lover, Clorinda, whom he has unwittingly killed, informing him that he wounded her again (Caruth 2). "Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding," Caruth explains, "trauma is not locatable in the simple violent and original event in an individual's past" (Caruth 4). Rather, it emerges in the way "it was precisely not known in the first instance—return[ing] to haunt the survivor later on" (Caruth 4). The diverse voices on emigration in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries precisely function like Clorinda's voice, evoking the enduring presence of the Famine among its post-generation.

This essay, focusing on Joyce's "Penelope" episode, explores the ways in which the episode participates in the discourse of emigration in Ireland, a discourse closely intertwined with colonialism and nationalism. While Joyce supported emigration, many intellectuals of his day were against it. What their rhetoric reveals, in its heavy reliance on the metaphor of wounded body for the emerging nation, is "the unwitting reenactment" of...