'Stone Hopes': Statues and the Politics of Longing in Joyce's Work

Ekphrasis, the verbal account of a visual image, is a rhetorical convention much deployed by modernist authors.¹ Ekphrastic description paradoxically permits an interfusion of the arts and becomes a means for written texts to acquire but also probe the aura surrounding the supposedly silent and superior visual media. This essay considers how Joyce deploys the ambiguous processes of commentary and metacritique linked with this Classical rhetorical device in the numerous allusions to public monuments and spaces that punctuate his work.

References to well-known Dublin landmarks, including Nelson's Pillar, the Wellington Monument, and the statue of Daniel O'Connell, to name but a few, routinely figure in Joyce's texts. They help to create a sense of the precise geography of the city and also act as a means of unfolding the symbolic resonances and occluded historical contexts of its streetscapes. As with so many other aspects of the materialities that Joyce's writings evince, the allusions to Dublin's statues and monuments create a sense of the chaotic density of lived experience while also dissecting and reflecting on the ideological determinants and psychic substrata underlying everyday existence. The statues of Dublin in Joyce's oeuvre seem to be both casually observed, inert objects and also redolent and evocative symbols that act as coordinates for buried but vital cultural and historical memories. In examining how the references to statues are deployed in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, this essay proposes to probe how these scattered moments permit an analysis of how art and life intersects and how the political implicitly underwrites even the most disregarded facets of the topography of a colonial city. Additionally, Joyce wrests the symbolism of statues from the public domain and uses them as indices of personal import. Statues, as they are reflected on in his texts, demonstrate the intersection of the private and the political; they are used not just to intimate and canvas collective memories but also to map out the infinitely complex individual psychodramas of his characters.

Tracing the images of statues in Joyce's fiction is moreover a tantalizing and elusive process because it forcibly reminds us of the many different temporal dimensions that are conflated in his work. Ulysses, for example, depicts Dublin simultaneously as a seedy and down-at-heel imperial backwater, a vibrant and burgeoning domain struggling with the legacy and forlorn promise of post-Parnellite politics and with the dynamic energies of modernity, a place of desolation and poverty, and a space of utopian possibility. Furthermore, Joyce's writing still reconfigures the present cityscape as we encounter it today. It helps us to see the monuments of Dublin with altered perception and restores to visibility the statues that have been rendered even more mute by the passage of time and the ceaseless traffic, hectic pace, cluttered lines of vision, distracted attention spans, and crowded conditions of the twenty-first-century metropolis. Additionally, of course, his texts provide us with an historical lens and enable us to view monuments that have since been lost, destroyed, or displaced. Because of their potent evocation in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, the ghosts of former statutes continue to haunt the streets of Dublin. Despite its displacement by the current Spire, Nelson's Pillar in absentia remains as much part of the current fabric of O'Connell street as when it was actually in position there, due to its Joycean fictional afterlife.

Joyce seems to have been fascinated by the ambivalences accruing around the monuments of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin as through tortuous processes of negotiation the outward insignia of nationalism began to dislodge long-standing images of imperial conquest. As will become apparent, statues for Joyce act as signs of numerous opposing forces: they are at once emblems of an embalmed past and a constricted present, mortuary indices of mourning and melancholia, symbols of the comic vigour and anarchic potentialities of Irish society, surreal, phantom presences, and points of convergence for unresolved historical conflicts...