Memory Ireland: Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory

7. “Now, just wash and brush up your memoirias” Nation Building, the Historical Record, and Cultural Memory in Finnegans Wake 3.3

112 7 “Now, just wash and brush up your memoirias” Nation Building, the Historical Record, and Cultural Memory in Finnegans Wake 3.3 L E N PL AT T HISTORY/CULTUR AL MEMORY Joyce scholars have always been interested in situating Joyce in historical context , but only since the late 1980s has the “Joyce and History” formulation become central. In part, this turn toward “history” has been philosophical. Less concerned with Joyce as a historical subject, the American academy in the 1980s and early 1990s produced a Joyce engaged with the subject of history—that is with history as historiography. Such critics as Robert Spoo and James Fairhall, then, constructed a Joyce preoccupied with history as ideological formation, particularly in relation to the orthodoxies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography (Fairhall 1993; Spoo 1994). Spoo recognized that something he referred to as “genuine historical experience” operated at some undeniable level (1994, 158), but his Joyce was “principally concerned to contest a set of dominant articulations of history . . . Lecky, Collingwood, Croce et al.: these, and not (say) Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain, the Balfours, even Carson, were the more or less minatory figures in Joyce’s historical imagination” (Gibson and Platt 2006, 4–5). Elsewhere there were attempts to construct new versions of a politicized Joyce from more local historical materials. These responded not just to the historiographical turn in Joyce studies but also to a long and dramatic period Nation Building, the Historical Record, and Cultural Memory 113 of both structuralist and deconstructive energy. In specific relation to Wake studies, Margot Norris traced a tradition going back to Eugene Jolas and the 1920s, which, she claimed, had inaugurated “the vexing problematising of the ‘political’ in avant-garde art and theory” (1996, 178). In Wake criticism of the 1970s and the 1980s, language became “the field and paradigm for the play of power operative in the nonmaterialist social realm conceptualised as the symbolic order. Finnegans Wake thus came to be read politically with relatively little reference to ‘history’ conceptualised as a moment of temporality” (ibid.). In short, while we could agree that the Wake was “revolutionary,” there was no real focus on the realities against which it revolted. In response to this “linguistic self absorption” and the associated bloodless constructions of the Joyce identity (ibid., 178), Joyceans in the late 1980s began to work from very precise historical materials to produce a Joyce much more animated in relation to Irish, English, and, indeed, wider European politics and culture (see Cheng 1995; Nolan 1995; Platt 1998 and 2007; Gibson 2002). Inevitably, these involved new versions of Joyce’s politics. Whether this “Joyce and History” phase of Joyce studies is still developing or now overdeveloped is a matter for debate. It is clear, however, that the current interest in Joyce and the historiographical version of cultural memory has evolved out of historical approaches to Joyce.1 Its specific appeal seems to rest, first, in the challenge to what is usually presented as the orthodoxy of institutional history—although precisely what institutional history is and whether all published history must be tarred with the same brush are not made clear. At least this is the case in Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, an account so influential that here it stands in more generally for theoretical intersections across memory and history. Thus in cultural memory theory, history, both as the lived past and historiographical practice, is positioned not in the official past of parliamentarian archives, nor, necessarily, as in previous orthodoxies, at the radical margins, but rather becomes emphatically subjectivized, relativist, and a matter of the strategized imagination. The 1. Historiographical as opposed to, for example, Susan Stewart’s work, which comes to cultural memory from a cultural studies perspective; see Stewart 1994. 114 Len Platt “central goal” of Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, then, is to “reinterpret history ” in symbolic terms, “to define France as a reality that is entirely symbolic , and thus reject any definition that would reduce it to phenomena of another order” (Nora 1996, xxiv). This idea of cultural memory is attractive in part because it claims inclusivity. The “symbolic order” it arranges has a phenomenological basis that displaces the “intellectual experience of the historian” with “lived historical experience” (Nora 2001, viii). Here history is restored to a freshly convened and highly democratized constituency. In Nora’s articulation that constituency is usually imagined as...