Making Space in the Works of James Joyce edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop (review)

One of the most famous quotes by Joyce’s father upon the early interests of his son concerned the mapping of space: “If that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he’d sit, be God, and make a map of it” (JJII 28). Surprisingly, none of the contributors to this fine and varied volume on spatialities in Joyce quote this early instance of the role of cartography in his work, although several of the essays here, including those by Liam Lanigan and Eric Bulson, point to the importance of mapping Dublin, rather than the Sahara, in Joyce’s works. As many critics have pointed out over the years, Joyce’s cartographic imagination functioned best at a distance, and so, dropped in the middle of Trieste or Paris or Zurich, he tended to revert to mapping the Dublin from which he had exiled himself, rather than the European cities of his daily acquaintance. Though John McCourt has indicated how Trieste contributed to the making of Bloom, none of the essays in this volume directly considers how Joyce’s mapping of Dublin was mediated by his European locations, which is unfortunate, given that such an approach would demonstrate how Joycean geographies are always overlayered and interwoven with other spaces.¹ Michael Seidel’s 1976 volume, Epic Geography, was perhaps the first work to explore this complex interweaving of spaces in Ulysses, although the focus here was upon how Victor Bérard’s imagined geography of Homer’s Mediterranean was paralleled in Joyce’s use of the geography of Dublin.²

Seidel’s approach, which he calls “the layering of Irish and Mediterranean spaces,” is one that combines physical geographical space—the streets of Dublin and the Mediterranean sea—with textual representations of these spaces by Homer, Bérard, and Joyce (xiii). Making Space follows this division between the textual and the geographical, between metaphorical and material space, by including essays that tend to position themselves on one side or other of this binary. Hence, Laurent Milesi’s chapter on “The Habitus of Language(s) in Finnegans Wake,” which cleverly analyses how Joyce “thematicizes geolinguistics” in the Wake and uses Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger to demonstrate the ethics of “thinking space or spatiality” (145, 153), conceives space in an almost entirely textual fashion.³ Similarly, Katherine O’Callaghan’s elegant discussion of Joyce’s use of repetition and the leitmotif is concerned with how “noncartographical spaces” appear in his texts, while David Spurr’s analysis of Joyce and the postal system takes its cue from a quote from Jacques Lacan: “There is no real space. It’s a purely verbal construction” (188, 161).⁴ On the other hand, the essays by Luke Gibbons, Michael Rubenstein, and Lanigan all, in diverse ways, interrogate how Joyce represents the cityscape of Dublin, taking a more materialist approach to the issue of spatiality. Rubenstein, for instance, focuses upon the brute materiality of public works in Dublin, demonstrating how gas-lighting and the water-works system are represented in “The Dead” and Ulysses as technologies evincing an “affirmation of modernity’s utopian promise” (110). Such materialist approaches, however, also move beyond being concerned with Joyce’s fidelity, or otherwise, to the physical environment: as Gibbons argues, “Joyce is not reproducing but recreating his city” (85) and, in a wonderful phrase, Joyce is “rendering fiction porous to the real world” (80).

The most stimulating essays in this collection, therefore, are those that consider the interaction of material and metaphorical spaces, demonstrating the porous interplay in Joyce between the two. Sam Slote, for instance, presents an incisive discussion of Joyce’s use of Thom’s Directory of Dublin’s streets, a text itself designed mimetically to represent the physical fabric of the city. Slote, however, demonstrates the complex “textual mediation” between the geography of Dublin, Ulysses, and Thom’s and is...