Memory Ireland: Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory

10. Weaving the Wind Joyce’s Uses and Abuses of Memory

157 10 Weaving the Wind Joyce’s Uses and Abuses of Memory J UST I N BE PL AT E Joyce, it seems, prized memory above all human faculties, going so far as to declare to his friend Frank Budgen that “[i]magination is memory” (Budgen 1970, 187). While the comment suggests a neat equivalence of imagination and memory, Joyce’s apparent monism is belied by the considerably more nuanced treatment of this theme in his writings. While he may have championed Giambattista Vico’s belief that the artist’s imagination is essentially a reworking of memory, it does not follow that mastering one’s powers of recall is always sufficient in controlling one’s creative material. As the “hides and hints and misses in prints” (FW 20.11) of Joyce’s compositional technique attest, the artist who, like the self-styled “fabulous artificer” (U 199) Stephen Dedalus, would weave and unweave his image must constantly negotiate the perilous passage between remembering and forgetting, between the fixed monuments of a cultural or a personal past (with their unspoken claims to pay honor to the dead) and the whirlpool of a self-serving historical amnesia, in which the litany of betrayals and failures marking time in Irish history are repressed, or at least remembered “otherwise.” Such an enterprise is all the more fraught in the context of Irish history, for if the risks of forgetting remain obvious, the more onerous claims of memory can be equally destructive for those caught up in its nets. From the Citizen’s belligerent toast in Barney Kiernan’s pub to “the memory of the dead” (U 291)—a thinly veiled challenge to Bloom, the “stranger” in their midst who has failed to pay due obeisance to the fallen heroes of Irish nationalism—to Stephen’s ghoulish 158 Justin Beplate disfigurement of his dead mother, transforming into macabre spectacle the memory of his refusal to kneel and pray on her deathbed, Joyce is at pains to remind us of the uses and abuses of memory in our imaginative reweaving of personal and collective histories. Joyce liked to portray his own faculty of memory as an indiscriminate collector of past experience, writing to Harriet Shaw Weaver the year before publication of Ulysses that “[m]y head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ‘most everywhere’” (SL 284). This flotsam of memory matter washed up by experience was the raw material of his aesthetic enterprise, so much so that he seems occasionally to have wondered what room was left for inventiveness. “Why regret my talent?” he once asked Jacques Mercanton, “I haven’t any. I write with such difficulty, so slowly. Chance furnishes me with what I need. I’m like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I want” (Mercanton 1967, 24). Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Joyce, describes his method of composition as “the imaginative absorption of stray material,” adding that “the method did not please Joyce very much because he considered it not imaginative enough, but it was the only way he could work” (JJII 250). Joyce’s assessment of his own powers of invention was far from one-sided, of course; his question to Budgen—“When you get an idea, have you ever noticed what I can make of it?” (Budgen 1972, 327)—is a pointed reminder of the creative power of his method. Yet it is clear that Joyce’s concern with the way in which acts of remembrance both bind and liberate creative energies is one of the central preoccupations of his writing, from the minute acts of remembrance patterning the characters’ lives in Dubliners to the vast, cyclic narratives of universal history dreamed up by Finnegans Wake, a work described by Seamus Deane as “a titanic exercise in remembering everything at the level of the unconscious because at the conscious level so much has been repressed that amnesia is the abiding condition” (1992, xviii). Joyce once boasted to Djuna Barnes that “[t]hey are all there, the great talkers, them and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously , what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does to what you Freudians call the subconscious” (Barnes 1987, 293). Joyce’s comment alludes to the way in which his technique works to register Joyce’s Uses...