James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future by Liam Lanigan (review)

There are a lot of references to the city in the writings of James Joyce. Liam Lanigan’s James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future goes deeper into the archive of Irish revivalist fiction and urban and town-planning than most literary studies of its kind, and by doing so it makes an original contribution to an otherwise well-established tradition: reading James Joyce’s modernism as inspired by the eccentric modernity of the city he always wrote about, Dublin. In this tradition of Joyce criticism, Dublin tends to become exemplary of urban modernity by way of its colonial exceptionality, and Joyce appears to be exceptional among his Irish contemporaries by way of his focus on urban Ireland as opposed to rural Ireland. Lanigan goes along with Dublin’s eccentric status as—to borrow a term from Joseph Valente—a “metro-colonial” city,¹ but he argues against setting Joyce’s work too far apart from other Irish writing in the modernist period (23). Lanigan observes that, “rather than regarding Joyce as uniquely positioned to invent an Irish urban literary sensibility,” we should instead acknowledge that “Irish writing at this time [was] more generally engaged with the problem of the city” (39). Lanigan begins polemically: Joyce is not as exceptional as the “machinery of Joyce scholarship” would, by force of its own gargantuan momentum, seem to demonstrate (1). The paradox of this claim, made as it is in a book with “Joyce” in the title, and containing four of eight chapters dedicated to Joyce’s writing, is that in the end it contributes to the machinery of Joyce scholarship. And though Lanigan does reveal a mostly unnoticed continuity between Joyce’s writing about Dublin and Revivalist writers’ writing about Dublin, he nevertheless maintains Joyce’s exceptionality as the only Irish writer of the period successfully to imagine “what the Irish city might become,” as opposed to remaining mired in “the limitations of the present” (101).

But the value of Lanigan’s book lies less with its general claim than with the archive it assembles and the readings it offers. Chapters 2 and 3 offer the reader a fascinating assortment of other less-well-known texts about Dublin, many of which may have been influences on Joyce’s characterization of the city as “a center of paralysis” (1).² His second chapter reads George Moore’s 1886 novel A Drama in Muslin as a scorching indictment of Dublin’s failures as a city, attributing them to a generalized “failure of the imagination” (52).³ According to Lanigan, however, Moore’s novel ends at a brutal impasse: “City and people decay together, and that is all” (63). Several of Moore’s stories are treated in chapter 3, alongside James Stephens’s 1912 The Charwoman’s Daughter and Seumas O’Sullivan’s 1917 Mud and Purple: Pages from the Diary of a Dublin Man.⁴ Lanigan’s readings are nuanced and detailed; the texts he presents are all revelations in themselves, as well as being tremendously useful to Joyce scholars who might otherwise remain unfamiliar with some of them. But the verdict Lanigan delivers on them is, nevertheless, quite damning: they all falter “at the moment of imaginative necessity” (94).

Enter Joyce. In chapter 4, Lanigan shows how Dubliners continues in this tradition of Irish writing about Dublin: decrying the paralysis and lack of imagination there, but failing—at least until the final story, “The Dead”—to imagine its way out of the impasse.⁵ For Lanigan, it is not until we meet Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that we find a protagonist who “is not alienated from the workings of the city” and who therefore presages Joyce’s attempt to “render the reality of city life” a few years later in Ulysses (152).

For Lanigan, it is the “Wandering Rocks” episode...