Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study by Rita Sakr (review)

Rita Sakr’s important work, Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel, explores the interpenetration of memory and public space that informs such recent interdisciplinary collections in Joyce studies as Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism and Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, as well as the fourth volume of the Memory Ireland series, James Joyce and Cultural Memory.¹ Sakr’s study analyzes the “fascination with urban space, including monumental space, with the disruptive psychodynamics and representational dynamics of fantasy and experimental form” in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Rashid al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow (4).² Grounding her work in Henri Lefebvre’s insight that a monumental work has “a horizon of meaning: a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of—and for the sake of—a particular action,” Sakr argues for the necessity of exploring how social practice as performance—whether actual or imagined—continually skews and subverts the intended meanings of public space.³

Monumental space, a space of agency and performance, for Sakr, entails three dimensions: “the monument as a physical object that is produced in order to create and occupy a space across political and architectural matrices, the shifting location of the fixed monument in lived and imagined spatialities, and the various processes of monumentalization that may occur through both discursive and spatial practices,” processes that trace the dialectical relationships of history and memory, of remembering and forgetting, in both official commemoration and everyday life (8). Countermonuments, monuments that invite the public to question official authority, acknowledge that overdetermination of memory and history by incorporating the public’s critique of authority. Through the “nightmarish dreamscapes, fractured psychological landscapes, destroyed architectural remains, and spaces of excessive monumentalization or radical countermonumentalization” of the five novels, Sakr traces the “labyrinthine negotiations of memory, history, and forgetting”—at times, imposed or coerced forgetting (20).

Sakr argues that Joyce’s works “signal an atypical iconoclastic vision of the monument as a living body resisting its paradoxical ontology of dead materiality and epistemology of nonperformative immortality” (41); his texts explore the countermemorial through “the monument’s imagined awakening from a static and sanitized perpetual past into the material and mobile fluidity of everyday life” (41). Inserted into the fabric of Dublin as potent and interpellative political symbols, the imperial/colonial and nationalist monuments of the monumental city are destabilized as Dubliners, in their everyday lives, respond ambivalently, indifferently, irreverently, or even subversively to them. In readings of Ulysses similar to those offered by Joyce scholars such as Robert Spoo, Anne Fogarty, Luke Gibbons, Enda Duffy, and me, Sakr examines the funeral procession and cemetery walks in “Hades,” “The Parable of the Plums” in “Aeolus,” Nelson’s Pillar again in “Wandering Rocks” and “Circe,” and the surreal carnival and political processions of “Circe” to argue that in Ulysses “monumentalization signifies and is acted out on various levels: as object, historical-political and social practices, literary motif, and shifting metaphor across the spaces of the ontological, epistemological, phenomenological, spatial, and textual” (79). Especially fine is her analysis of the one-legged sailor, the unsung instrument and neglected casualty of British imperial power, singing “The Death of Nelson” as he traverses the streets of Dublin begging for coins, as “an alternative moving monument and a countermonu-mental spectacle of living memory” (70). Importantly, she notes that, although the countermonumental energies of Ulysses may end in failed revolution, they also signal counterrevolution inasmuch as they are “part of microhistories erupting in macrohistory through the channels of the everyday as the circulation of bodies, words, and dreams in a landscape-theater orchestrates a phenomenology of stone to the rhythms of human life that build, conserve, ignore, insult, awaken, attack...