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Making Space in
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Irne Nmirovsky and the Cultural
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Angela Kershaw
11. Travel and Drugs in TwentiethCentury Literature
Lindsey Michael Banco
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Form and Style in Writers
Diaries, 19151962
Anna Jackson
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Cultural Change
Race, Sex and Nation
Gerardine Meaney
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from the Modern to
the Postmodern
Neil R. Davison
15. Travel and Modernist Literature
Sacred and Ethical Journeys
Alexandra Peat
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of Embodiment
Containing the Human
Charlotte Ross
17. Italo Calvinos Architecture
of Lightness
The Utopian Imagination in
an Age of Urban Crisis
Letizia Modena

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The Innovative Appetites of
M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas,
and Elizabeth David
Alice Lee McLean
19. Making Space in the Works of
James Joyce
Edited by Valrie Bnjam
and John Bishop

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the Works of James Joyce

Edited by
Valrie Bnjam
and John Bishop

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Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Making Space

ix
xi
1

VALRIE BNJAM

Space Wake: An Archaeology

20

JOHN BISHOP

Optical Space in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man

38

ANDR TOPIA

The Acoustic Space of Ulysses

55

VALRIE BNJAM

Text and the City: Joyce, Dublin, and Colonial Modernity

69

LUKE GIBBONS

Gabriels Remapping of Dublin: The Fabricated Cityscape of

The Dead

91

LIAM LANIGAN

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner: Plumbing

Consciousness in Joyces Dublin

109

MICHAEL RUBENSTEIN

Disorienting Dublin
ERIC BULSON

125

viii Contents
8

The Habitus of Language(s) in Finnegans Wake

145

LAURENT MILESI

Joyce the Post

155

DAVID SPURR

10 Mapping the Call from Afar: The Echo of Leitmotifs in James

Joyces Literary Landscape

173

KATHERINE OCALLAGHAN

11 The Thomistic Representation of Dublin in Ulysses

191

SAM SLOTE

12 Writing Space

203

DANIEL FERRER

List of Contributors
Bibliography
Index

215
219
231

Acknowledgments

Our thanks go fi rst and foremost to the contributors to this volume. From
the moment when the idea for this collection emerged, in the wake of an
International James Joyce Foundation Symposium in Budapest, and the fi nal
completion of the project, many years and vicissitudes later, their patience
and support have been both well tested and regularly found unfl inching.
Valrie Bnjam particularly wants to thank Laurent Milesi, who succeeded in making space, and time, in his extraordinarily busy schedule to
advise her with the introduction. His help and friendship have been, as they
always are, priceless.
We also wish to express our gratitude to our editors at Routledge, Erica
Wetter and Elizabeth Levine and to Michael Watters of Integrated Book
Technology, Inc. Their assistance and counsel have been essential in making this book exist.
John Bishop wishes to thank the colleagues who particularly inspired his
thoughts. Special thanks go to Eric Falci, whose exciting new work on bilingualism in poetry gave him much new material to think about in regard to
issues central to this book, and also to Dan Blanton, Mitch Breitwieser, Jay
Fliegelman, and Mike Rubenstein: talking with them always made his thinking more complex and refined than it otherwise would have been.
Valrie Bnjam is grateful for the sabbatical semester, granted in 2007
2008 by the French Conseil National des Universits, which allowed her
to launch this project. Her thanks also go to her colleagues in the English
Department at the Universit de Nantesparticularly Marie Mianowski
and Georges Letissierwho made this leave possible by taking on her
teaching load and administrative responsibilities. In a different vein, she
owes a heavy debt of gratitude to Larry Norman for his patience, availability, and invaluable help in reading her work and casting on it his generous
critical eye. She also benefitted from discussions of this project with many
friends and colleagues: Daniel Ferrer, Colleen Jaurretche, Vike Plock, Sam
Slote, as well as Borbala Farago, whose good sense and encouragements
were, as always, most precious.
A portion of Michael Rubensteins essay A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Urban Planner: Plumbing Consciousness in Joyces Dublin already

Acknowledgments

appeared in his Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the

Postcolonial (Notre Dame University Press, 2010), and the original publishers are gratefully acknowledged.
Valrie Bnjam & John Bishop

Abbreviations

References to the publications listed below appear throughout this volume

as abbreviations followed by page number, unless otherwise specified. Editions other than those cited below are indicated in the chapters notes and
listed in the fi nal bibliography.

WORKS BY JAMES JOYCE

CW

The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Eds. Ellsworth

Mason & Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959.

Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert

Scholes & A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1967.

FW

Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939:

London: Faber & Faber, 1939. These two editions
have identical pagination. References are by page and
line, or occasionally by book and chapter

JJA

The James Joyce Archive. Ed. Michael Groden et al.

New York & London: Garland Publishing, 197779.
Volume citation conforms to the one given in the
James Joyce Quarterly.

Letters I

Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New

York: Viking, 1957; reissued with corrections, 1966.

Letters II

Letters of James Joyce. Vol. II. Ed. Richard Ellmann.

New York: Viking, 1966.

Letters III Letters of James Joyce. Vol. III. Ed. Richard Ellmann.
New York: Viking, 1966.
P

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text,

Criticism and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New
York: Viking Penguin, 1968.

xii

Abbreviations

SH

Stephen Hero. Ed. John J. Slocum & Herbert Cahoon.

New York: New Directions, 1944, 1963.

Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York

& London: Garland Publishing, 1984, 1986. In
paperback by Garland, Random House, and Bodley
Head, and by Penguin between 1986 and 1992.
References appear as episode number plus line number.

U-G

Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York and

London: Garland, 1984. References to the Foreword,
Critical Apparatus, Textual Notes, Historical
Collation, or Afterword.

OTHER WORKS AND JOURNALS

JJI

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1959.

JJII

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1982.

JJQ

James Joyce Quarterly

Whenever appropriate, abbreviations of other editions or texts frequently

referred to will be introduced in individual essays.

Introduction
Making Space
Valrie Bnjam

paperspace is a perfect signature of its own

(FW 115. 78)

THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG GEOGRAPHER

In the fi rst chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young
Stephen Dedalus attempts to concentrate on a lesson in his geography textbook, but he soon gets lost in considerations of the vast ensembles of countries and continents. He then turns to the flyleaf where he has written,
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe (P 15)

This is how the artist as a child envisions his position in space: he locates
himself at the center of a widening series of concentric circles, elaborating
a list that begins like a signature, soon turns into a postal address, but
eventually evolves into a new, Stephen-centered cosmology. As such, the list
contains a degree of irony: the beginning would seem to allow the book, if
lost, to be returned to its owner, but this sequence of events becomes less
and less likely as we move down the list and reach the universe. Stephen
envisaging himself, or his lost textbook, at this scale is both a ludicrous
and an impressive possibility.1 As absurd as it sounds, the list identifies the
successive stages leading from microcosm to macrocosm, in the process
positioning Stephen as the primary element and subjective individuality at
the central core of this spatially ordered whole. Written on the flyleaf of the
textbook, it inscribes subjectivity withinand even as the organizing principle ofthe factual, objective, or political realities of official geography.

Valrie Bnjam

Indeed, the list is not without implications regarding political divisions of

space, as Ireland finds its place directly within Europe. Without the slightest hesitation, Stephen has sidestepped the alternative political ensemble of
the British Empire. Eventually, we come to realize that individuality is also
reflected on the space of the page we are reading: the list appears in italics,
with a larger margin than the bulk of the text, in the process reminding
readers of the little songs and poems that have been scattered among Stephens thoughts since the opening of the novel. Unlike those other budding
literary productions, however, this one is typographically centered, thus
creating variations of margin length on both sides, a potentially innovative
play on literary conventions that both employs and signals the writing page
as a spatial object involving specific and promising properties.
The originality of Stephens writing becomes even clearer a few lines
later, as we read what his friend Fleming has penned on the opposite page:
Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation. (P 16)

A poor attempt at abiding by traditional poetic constraints, with its irregular metrical and rhyming schemes, Flemings quatrain flaunts its conventionality via a mildly mocking acceptation of political and religious
dictates: while Stephens cosmology conspicuously lacked any transcendental dimension, Fleming positions heaven as the retributive conclusion to
his little poem, and whereas Stephens phrasing factually situated Ireland
within Europe, Flemings stands out as a more traditional nationalistic
pronouncement. Paradoxically, although Fleming makes use of a fi rst person that contrasts with Stephens impersonality, his literary production,
in regard to the spatiality it conveys, stands out as a lot less subjective
and original. Idiosyncratically responding to the striking contrast between
these two pieces of writing and the placements in space they each suggest,
Stephen next decides to read backward, first Flemings verses, then his own
lines, a process that eventually leads him to speculations about the infi nite
universe, Gods all-encompassing comprehension, and the various names of
God in different languages, which only He may understand (P 16). Beyond
the navet of such theological musings, experienced readers of Joyces later
works will have detected here two distinctive features of his more mature
writing: an invitation to play with the space of the printed page (reading
backward), and a fi rst, albeit timid, link between the organization of space
and the post-Babelian multiplicity of world languages. In this fi rst instance
of the young artists positioning can already be detected the treatment of
spatiality that will unfold throughout Joyces work, and which this collection investigates: the prominence of individual perception and intrapsychic
subjectivity, and their contrastive interplay with objective conceptions of

Introduction

space (geometry, topography, geography, astronomy, etc.); the variations

on, and alternative versions of, conventional organizations of space (be
they political, religious, scientific, or linguistic); and the parallel play on
the space of the page (that on which the artist writes as well as that which
the reader peruses).
The stylistic, typographical and linguistic dimensions are from the start
essential elements of Joyces spatiality, inseparable from the permanent
humorous displacements in his writing. While the artist, as we hint in our
title, both creates (and re-creates) his own space as well as makes space
for his readers interpretationsincluding the Blanchotian space of literature in which the work of art endlessly unfolds and completes itself as
readers welcome its generosity2 in both instances he also makes space
for jest and jokes. In the Ondt and Gracehoper fable of Finnegans Wake,
Joyce reverts several times to the phrase making spaces,3 eventually letting us hear the making spass from which it evolves (from the German
Spa machen, to joke, to make fun of).4 Revealingly, the space (or Spa,
fun) made is always plural (making spaces as one would make faces): fi rst
as the (literal) space opening on the page from the multiplicity of Joyces
puns and portmanteau words (paperspace FW 115.7); second, as the
past space of Dublin recreated ad infinitum and infi nitely fluctuating as
it becomes transmuted into all kinds of different cities (for Where are
we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space? [FW 558.33]); third, as
the imaginary space created in the readers mind (making spaces in his
psyche [FW 416.45]), a space which might be anywhere and therefore
really exists nowhere: Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast
ere wohned . . . [FW 152.1819]erewhon, or in other words, nowhere
read backward, as in Samuel Butlers satirical utopia.5 The displacements
within, and discrepancies between, these various spaces open up other
spaces and allow for even more Spa/fun. Such is the endlessly generative
quality of Joyces spatialities which we have wanted to suggest in our
title, as well as the essential humour of Joyces paperspace: for if reading
Joyces work is not fi rst and foremost about having Spa/fun, all the eminent spatialist[s] (FW 149.19) who have contributed to this volume will
have displayed their expertise in vain.

FATHER TIMES AND MOTHER SPACIES (FW 600.23)

As we launched our quest and the project for this volume, it was with
the conviction that one of the larger critical questions posed by Joyces
work was what happens to space through the creative transmutation of
his writing. Joyces preoccupation with spacebe it urban, geographic,
stellar, geometrical, or opticalobviously appeared a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. We soon found out, however, that space
was indeed a traditional avenue of Joycean criticism, but one that had

Valrie Bnjam

also traditionally been severely delimited, if not quickly discarded: while

Joyces rendering of the urban space of Dublin has been extensively
and perhaps exhaustivelystudied and documented, many early critics
pointed to the predominance of time over space in his work. Between
what would seem to be the exclusively urban nature of Joyces concern
with space, and the belief that space somehow disappears in his writing,
there would appear to be no opening for a broader reflection on spatiality
in his work.
Joyces rendering of the stream of consciousness and of the pace of early
twentieth-century urban life both pointed his fi rst readers to the modernity
of his treatment of time. Following the traditional dichotomy, this modernist rendition of time would have required a proportional disregard for spatiality, a tendency which well fitted the universalist aims of high modernism
and its professed contempt for local color and particulars, as Joyces work
supposedly discarded the representation of reality in favor of the materiality of language.6 Originally, the view that Joyce favored time above all
else was perhaps most revealingly illustrated by the two opposed yet complementary responses to his work by Wyndham Lewis and Marcel Brion.
Lewis was resolutely critical as he launched an attack in his 1927 Time
and Western Man against the contemporary thinkers and artists (including Bergson, Darwin, Einstein, Proust, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein,
and Joyce) who, in his sweepingly negative view, were obsessed with time,
either as adepts of pure time (Bergson) or as space-timeist (Einstein).
Laurent Milesi has shown how Joyce himself answered Lewiss criticism in
the three episodes he drafted in 1927, which subsequently found their way
into Finnegans Wake: The Mookse and the Gripes (in I.6), the parodic
revision of Euclids First Theorem (middle section of II.2), and The Ondt
and the Gracehoper (in III.1).7 It is through caricature and ironic allusions that Joyce responded to Lewis, mocking his approach and the very
language of his accusations.
It is also probably under Joyces guidance that Marcel Brion attempted
to counter Lewiss attack: The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce
appeared in the 1929 collection of articles written by Joyces friends and
collaborators, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, in which its part was to defend Joyces treatment of time as well as underline his affi nities with Einstein. Brion made
his point, however, by grossly simplifying the spacetime dichotomy and
offhandedly discarding the question of space in Joyces work as blatantly
un-modern: The fourth dimension is actually the only one that matters,
he wrote, adding: Space is nothingit is reduced every day by mechanical means of communication. A few pages later he speculated that Joyce
could compose a book of pure time.8 Rejecting the latter, clearly metaphorical, hypothesis, one could just as easily argue that the subjective reduction (rather than destruction) of space by modern speed does not entail its
objective disappearance, but rather transforms its perception, and hence

Introduction

that modernity, far from annihilating the experience of space, only modifies and complexifies it.
Just as Henri Bergsons duration did not empty the concept of time of
all meaning, space can only be enriched by the consideration of the experience of spatialityin connection with Bergsons extension, for instance,
or with Henri Lefebvres concept of lived space. As a temporary conclusion to this debate, it might be useful to remember that Joyces work
often carries us beyond traditional, simplistic dichotomiesthe space
time opposition among them, which he preferably treated as a spacetime
continuum. Indeed, in Finnegans Wake Joyce repeatedly plays upon the
phrase spaces of timean alliance of words already common in the
Latin spatia temporis, where spatium is employed in the sense of a space/
period of timeand one rarely fi nds a reference to space in the book that
is not closely followed with an allusion to time.9 The beginning of Proteus already mulled over this motif: A very short space of time through
very short times of space (U 3.1112): Stephen playing the blind man on
Sandymount Strand, a stride at a time, realizes the ineluctable interaction
of the modalities of the visual and the audible, of the nacheinander (succession in time) and nebeneinander (juxtaposition in space), which Lessing
in his Laocoon artificially attempted to divide. Rhythm begins, you see.
I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the
mare (U 3.2324): if rhythm begins, not only with both seeing and hearing, but also with marchinga movement necessarily unfolding at once
through space and timethen the artist can walk or gallop, decelerate or
accelerate, but can no more discard space than he can dispose of time.10

URBAN SPACE: DOUBLING DUBLIN?

In spite of the predominance of time over space in early Joyce criticism,
there exists a long-standing tradition of considering the question of space
in Joyces work, and of doing so particularly through the prism of urban
spatiality.11 For many early critics, Joyces modernism lay primarily in his
representation of cities and in his attention to the experience of everyday
urban life, almost independently of Dublins specificities. As Ezra Pound
plainly asserted of Dubliners, [Joyce] gives us things as they are, not only
for Dublin, but for every city. Erase the local names and a few specifically
local allusions . . . and these stories could be retold of any town.12 This is
in keeping with Joyces famous statement to Arthur Power: For myself, I
always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can
get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained
the universal.13 In this sense, Joyces evocation of Dublin partakes, along
with Virginia Woolfs London,14 Walter Benjamins Paris, or Alfred Dblins Berlin, in a cosmopolitan trend of literature that explores the writing of
modern city life in connection with modernist literary experimentations.15

Valrie Bnjam

Against a parochial, possibly nationalist vision of Dublin as place, this view

tends to privilege the modernity of urban space as it is experienced by any
metropolitan inhabitant.16
This tendency of Joyce criticism, or rather the simplistic dichotomy upon
which it seems to rely (national rurality vs. international urbanity), has been
more than partially countered by the renewal of Irish studies, which has
shown how Joyce combined, from his earlier writings, the familiar geographical details of Dublin life with a kind of spatial politics that allowed
a critique of both colonial and nationalist univocal conceptions of space.17
Indeed, while refusing to limit the representation of Irish space to the rural,
idealized Ireland of the literary revival, Joyces remapping of the Dublin territory aimed at a political liberation, in defiance of Dublins very motto (Obedienta civium urbis felicitas, the obedience of the citizens produces a happy
city), which Joyce mocked in Finnegans Wake: Obeisance so their sitinins
is the follicity of this Orp! (FW 494.2122). As Anne Fogarty has shown in
a remarkable article on the politics of space in Dubliners, the rich symbolic
and psychic geographies of Joyces interior and exterior landscapes undermine any unitary or simplistic conception of Dublin and Irish space.18
Several of the contributions in our book follow this lead. Drawing on the
politics of space, and particularly of urban space, Liam Lanigan demonstrates how the cityscape presented in Dubliners alienates its inhabitants.
In an innovative analysis of A Little Cloud, he uncovers the ideological
tenets of architectural and urban-planning conceptions that, subordinating
the individual to a rational, integrative urban system, influence the uncomprehending Dubliners. But Lanigan also shows that Joyce later presents in
Gabriel Conroy a character capable of an original, personal reading of the
city around him, as The Dead introduces a more complex relationship
between space and character, and intimates the possibility of other, multiple and contradictory, interpretations of Dublin.
Likewise concerned with urban planning, Michael Rubensteins essay
offers an original postcolonial interpretation of Joyces interest in public works as engineering national consciousness in relation with the utopian promise of modernity. Rubenstein fi rst focuses on waterworks in the
Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses, subtly combining historical elements with narratological analysis, to demonstrate that Joyce presents in
the sewer an image of the conscience and consciousness of the city, even
employing the technologies structuring urban space as the epistemic basis
of his fiction. Subsequently focusing on The Dead, Rubenstein points to
gaslight as the essential trope pervading the story, both as narrative and
infrastructural medium, and offers in passing a thought-provoking reading
of the character of Michael Furey, no longer the embodiment of rural Ireland, but on the contrary of the modernized space of Ireland transcending
the traditional rural/urban dichotomy. By taking infrastructural, communal space into account, Rubenstein redefines the spatiality of nationhood
and, on that basis, reconstrues narrative space.

Introduction

Both these contributions accompany Luke Gibbonss powerful reading of

Joyces recovery of the Dublin territory. Gibbons takes his point of departure
in the remark that Joyces representation of space is informed by his addressing in priority those familiar with his culture. Moving, however, over and
beyond the sterile dichotomy of modernity vs. Irishness, Gibbons connects
the formal and linguistic innovations of modernism with Dublin and Irish
culture, thus pointing to the colonial modernity of Joyces writing. Considering the wider question of the representation of space, he shows how Joyce
placed historical circumstances and spatial particulars at the very core of his
work, thus radically reshaping the complex relationship between text and
spatial context. Ulysses achieves the feat of triggering in Dublin residents an
aesthetic, defamiliarizing response to the city, while also conveying an effect
of lived space to those who are not familiar with Dublin.
The wider question of the representation of space is indeed crucial to
the ontological status of Joyces Dublin. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce often
plays on the local pronunciation of Dublin, making it sound like doubling, and thus hinting at the possibility of producing a doppelganger (or
doblinganger [FW 490.17]) of his native city.19 But whether Joyces text
is haunted by Dublin or the reverse might be difficult to assess. The real
Dublin may in fact be doubled by Joyces Dublin, and its present-day
incarnation haunted by Joyces literary cityscape, as reader-tourists daily
walk its concrete, material space with quotes and episodes from his works
in mind, and re-create the space of 1904 Dublin every June 16. As the Irish
Tourist Board certainly knows, and knows how to advertise, Joyces work,
and particularly Ulysses, has become a prism for the touristic exploration
and exploitation of the city. Although this evolution is most revealing of
the suggestive powers of Joyces book, one would nevertheless refrain from
equating Ulysses with a mere document testifying to the both picturesque
and dreary reality of early twentieth-century Dublin.20 While claiming that
Dublin, if destroyed, could be rebuilt from his work, he probably did not
foresee that its international appeal would one day lie in the use of his
masterpiece as a city guide mapping the routes of tourists adopting the
trajectories his characters followed on Bloomsday. Joyces own travelling,
as proven by the concluding words of Ulysses (Trieste, Zurich, Paris),
was more centrifugal than centripetal, and at times the self-exiled writer
went so far as to envisage the phantasmal disappearance of his heimlich
(or unheimlich) hometown. I want, said Joyce . . . to give a picture of
Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the
earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.21 This famous pronouncement was revealingly uttered while walking down the Universittstrsse
in Zrich, in other words as Joyce was well away from his native land and
trying to position himself, with Pounds benediction, as an internationally
renowned writer in continental Europe. Joyce always wrote about Dublin from afar and, particularly in Finnegans Wake, progressively included
more and more other cities within the representation of his hometown.22 As

Valrie Bnjam

Gibbons notes, such a project aims at recreating rather than reproducing

the original space he had left behind.
However, it is in terms of reproduction that a number of Joycean critics
have treated the question of urban space in Joyces works. As Eric Bulson
demonstrates in his contribution, this has for some time been dominated
by the topographical approach of literary cartography, inherited from the
fi rst literary maps made of the cities in nineteenth-century realist novels
(Dickenss London, Balzacs Paris, etc.) and perfected by newly available
computerized means.23 Bulson, however, notes that Ulysses is both an eminently mappable novel and perhaps the most incredibly disorienting book
ever written. In fact, although Joyce himself made much use of maps, 24 and
much use of maps may be made to understand his work, his writing also
offers a deconstructive approach to the very process of the cartographic
representation of space, as the beginning of the Ithaca episode in Ulysses
offers ample illustration:
What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?
Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place
they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets
and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left,
Gardiners place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of
Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing
right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching,
disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before
Georges church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than
the arc which it subtends. (U 17.110)
This both perfectly exact and utterly disembodied representation of Bloom
and Stephens trajectory exposes the limits of a cartographic representation
of real space, and as the end of the citation reveals, does so in connection with
the geometrical modelization of topographical representation. The very use
of maps implies the superimposition on real, lived space of the mathematically defi ned, bi-dimensional Euclidian plane, which presupposes that any
shape or movement may be described by an equation based on Cartesian
coordinates. This unpalatable approach to spatiality is the exact contrary
of what readers of Ulysses have encountered before being confronted with
the acidities of Ithaca. Until now, they have felt and experienced Dublin,
they have been made to feel as if they lived there. 25 As Bulson notes, unlike
Dickenss London or Balzacs Paris, which stand as introductory backdrop,
creating an atmosphere before the narrative zooms in on a set of characters,
Joyces Dublin is immediately rendered from within. In accordance with the
useful distinction elaborated by one of the most famous theoreticians of
space, Henri Lefebvre, readers of Joyce encounter Dublin as lived space, not
as conceived space, not as mappable abstraction: The architect (and the
urbanist) has a representation of space based on the graphic mediation of

Introduction

plans and perspectives which is a conceived space which is totally different

from and cannot accommodate the lived space of real people.26 Bulsons
paradoxical response consists, not in getting rid of maps, but in employing
them to get lost in Ulysses. Drawing his inspiration from the Situationnistes drive and dtournement, Bulson reads Ulysses as an invitation to
produce rather than passively consume space.
In rendering the lived space of Dublin, Joyce turns our attention to the
urban social fabric and collective imagination that shape urban spatiality. 27 These developments become essential when connecting the question
of space with that of gender. The limitations touching the possibilities for
movement and the spheres of action for women are very palpable in Joyces
writing, from Dubliners onward. 28 As Fogarty has analyzed, Joyce often
turns our attention to the phantasmal space of female longing, contrasting it with the physical entrapment of womens bodies in the space of the
home. 29 Even Molly Blooms powerful affi rmation of desire remains spatially contained: spending Bloomsday at home in Eccles Street, she is the
still center of Leopolds musing and of his successively centrifugal and centripetal trajectory. While one may contend that she gets the last word and
as such embodies Joyces modernist aesthetics, 30 in spatial terms, even considering the material space of the book, one cannot avoid the feeling that
she fi nally standsor lies ratheron her own, in a monologue which may
give the impression of overflowing all constraints and restrictions, but yet
remains isolated and bound within the spatial limits of the Penelope episode. It is, however, in overstating such spatial limits and social limitations
that Joyces writing is most efficiently subversive. Thus his experimenting
with female interior monologue is closely bound with his exploration of
interior space, and particularly efficient in its aim to deconstruct gender
constructions.31 Female interior space often appears as the dark double of
the predominantly male space outside, and the analysis of Joyces gendered
space unearths a powerful critique of stereotypes that undermines the binaries of traditional gender categories.32 However, while keenly aware that
gender is a fundamental aspect of the spatiality in Joyces works, we could
not but notice how prominently it already features on the critical agenda:
except as a tangential concern in some of the essays, it has therefore not
been further mined in this volume.

SPATIAL PERCEPTION
Preceding Lefebvres notion of lived space is that of perceived space, or
in other words, a conception of space centered on the body. In Joyces work
also, perception is at the very heart of the rendering of space, as sensations,
more or less disrupted, more or less consciously elaborated, are focused upon
as the mediation between the outside world and intrapsychic space. As previously evoked, the relation between space and subjectivity, between landscape

10

Valrie Bnjam

and mindscape, is not an utterly new development of fiction. Problematizing

this relation and focusing upon its very ontological status, however, may be
unprecedented. In nineteenth-century realist novels such as Dickenss, or in
the panoramic openings of D. H. Lawrences short stories, for instance, the
narrative often opens with a visual presentation of the space where the characters will evolve, one that is already suggestive of their moods, modes, or
destinies. Such visual spatial introductions are rarely present in Joyces work,
with the notable exception of North Richmond Street that opens the Araby
story in Dubliners. The notion of sight, however, is strangely embedded at
the very core of this presentation, since it is the street itself that is characterized as blind, and the houses gazing imperturbably at one another (D 29).
There is no human or anthropomorphic gaze surveying the scene, but the
dcor itself seems to be looking down at the boys coming out of the Christian Brothers School. Joyces metaphor thus operates a reversal of traditional
realist introductions and announces his future deconstruction of the visual
apprehension of space. When in Ulysses we read the mock stage-direction
dcor description that opens onto both the Mabbot street entrance of Nighttown and the improbable delirium of Circe, any expectation of a visual
representation of space promptly dissolves: the question of representation, in
the sense of giving both a likeness and a theatrical production, is thoroughly
disrupted and soon erupts into the phantasmal, hallucinatory dimension that
is the episodes hallmark.33 The intrapsychic space that opens up before us
would be hard to measure scientifically: it is a multidimensional, movable,
fluctuating entity.
Analyzing the perception of space in Joyces works is the aim of the
fi rst essays in this collection. Focusing on optics and on the complex circulation of gazes at work in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, Andr Topia presents us with an interesting phenomenology
of vision, envisaging the gaze as an optical lens mediating between exterior
space and interior mental space. Topia offers an in-depth analysis of the
characters troubling exchanges of looks, of their often illusory command
of their own visual fields, and shows how this dysfunctional optics ends
up creating a geometrical transformation of space. Alterations in vision
concomitantly entail alterations in the appearance of the world and in the
sense of space and spatiality.
These observations can also be related to biographical data. Space,
what you damn well have to see (U 9.86), muses Stephen in the Scylla
and Charybdis episode of Ulysses. One cannot help but wonder about
Joyces own impaired vision, and how it necessarily entailed his reliance
on (and therefore conscience of) other means of perceiving space, how it
could not but lead him to question the general preeminence of sight in
the apprehension of space and in its literary rendering. Seeing space is not
only the traditional diegetic requirement for constructing a narrative, it
also soon became a prediegetic incapacity of the living author, as Joyces
visual apprehension was de facto progressively reduced. Roy Gottfried has

Introduction

11

already studied in depth how Joyces impaired vision had influenced, not
only the matter, but also the very material of his writing, and particularly
his tendency to envisage the linguistic medium as problematic materiality.34
It was in part Joyces deteriorating visionand his consequent exile from
the conventional worlds of visual and Cartesian spacethat enabled him
so productively to map out aspects of space that lie beyond or outside the
visual, making him perhaps in that sense an exemplary modernist writer.
It is self-evident that the reduced sense of sight would produce a heightened reliance on other senses, especially concerning the apprehension of
space. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we usually remember
Stephens broken glasses as triggering the dramatic scene of unfair punishment with the prefect of studies. It is also, however, the original impression
that launches a poetic apprehension of lived space, centering on sounds
and rhythms: And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricketbats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: like
drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl (P 41).
The magic of sound, through which the cricket bats give their own soothing, flowing answer to the riddles troubling the schoolboy, is made even
more vivid by Stephens broken glasses: acoustic perceptions compensate
for visual impairment, helping to develop the budding artists own, poetic
inner speech. This is the path that I have chosen to develop in my own
chapter, The Acoustic Space of Ulysses: focusing on Joyces interest in the
acoustic properties of space and in these properties ability to defi ne and
render space, I contend that the sense of space readers get from the book is
in great part made up of acoustic notations, a phenomenon nourished from
Joyces well-known interest in music, but also from his probable knowledge
of scientific acoustics.35
But beyond sight and hearing or any other sense on which Joyce relies to
give us the rich, complete impression of spatiality we derive from his books,
the very foundation of the apprehension of space lies in the unconscious
and in the primal experience of intrauterine space. This is why this collection opens with John Bishops tour of space in Finnegans Wake. Bishop
draws from the quasi-amniotic spatiality of sleep in Finnegans Wake,
from which unfold more evolved forms of space, to investigate how ones
sense of space develops from infantile consciousness, moving from maternal spatiality toward the elaboration of an intimate geometry. Observing how Joyce suggested that spatial dimensionality is an emanation of
the body, and in the process questioned the very structuring of the space
we live in, Bishop shows how the disrupted geometries and geographies of
Finnegans Wake testify to the cultural transformations by which classical
Aristotelian conceptions of place were gradually replaced by the modern
notion of space, abstract and infi nite, isomorphic and immaterial, homogeneous and unitary.
Not only is it via language (or landuage [FW 327.20]) that Joyce conveys his original sense of a both familiar and defamiliarized lived space, it

12

Valrie Bnjam

is also through a caricature of their idiolects that he elaborates his critique

of the traditional scientific or political organizations of space. In this sense,
Joyces experimenting with the linguistic medium can be understood as an
answer to Lefebvres complaint that [l]anguages are spoken and written in
a mental space-time which Reason tends to privilege metaphysically. They
enunciate poorly the social time, the spatial practice. The words are lacking
to explain our spatiality.36

THE LINGUISTICS OF SPACE

If the perception of space is the prerequisite to a discussion of Joyces urban
space, the consequences of this discussion inevitably lead to linguistic considerations. Indeed, Joyces foregrounding of the materiality of language,
together with his focusing on the urban space of Dublin, has often led
critics to draw analogies between his books and city space. In a French
introduction to Joyces work, Jean-Michel Rabat has compared ones
progress through Ulysses to ones fi rst visit to a large metropolis, which
may be attempted with a guidebook or a map, or just the chance advice of
a passer-by.37 Developing a similar idea, in his commentary on Wandering Rocksthe Ulysses episode that best captures the experience of living
in a cityRichard Brown has proposed reading the city as a kind of text
and the text as a kind of city, remarking how reading the chapter could
be compared to experiences of orientation and disorientation in an unfamiliar urban space.38 The relation is thus twofold: if reading Joyce conveys
the experience of moving in the urban space of Dublin, the experience of
reading Joyce is itself analogous to moving through urban space.
The last series of chapters in this collection investigate spatiality in its
relation to language(s) and to Joyces work with the very materiality of his
medium. Milesis chapter plunges us at the heart of this question, drawing
on the Derridean notion of hospitality to consider language itself as a space,
as a house we inhabit and that inhabits us. Milesi analyzes the language
in Finnegans Wake as a space where is staged the drama of reconciliation
between estranged and local languages and culture, where all languages are
allowed to interact and coexist, in a movement of de- and recolonization
that welcomes the other within, through hybridity and miscegenation. He
convincingly demonstrates how the Wakean idiom develops, beyond the
staging of geolinguistic dramas, a veritable spatial ethics.
Working within a similar theoretical framework, and also interrogating
the relation to the other, David Spurrs contribution offers a completely different contribution, in the form of a new outlook on the question of the post
in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Analyzing the postal system as organizing
the deployment and transmission of language through space, Spurr draws a
parallel between the postcards and letters endlessly circulating throughout
the space of Dublin in Joyces books, and the books themselves. He shows

Introduction

13

how this is indissociable from the problematic of desire between the subject
and its other, and from the delay, displacement and distancing involved in
desire itself. Connecting this approach with the essays on urban and social
space, Spurr perceptively remarks that Joyces space is not just there; it is
rather something produced, ultimately, by the forces of power and desire.
The relation between language, distance and desire that stands at the
heart of Joyces symbolic spatiality also draws the attention of Katherine
OCallaghan in her chapter, but via the original angle of music and music
theory. Observing the recurring musical motif of a beckoning call from afar
throughout Joyces work, OCallaghan analyses the geographical quality of
this call, which points to Joyces own exilic condition, and investigates the
perpetual tension thus created, as the call both evokes the space between
and promises a reconciliation that will bridge the gap. Drawing on Joyces
interest in music, Callaghan further elaborates on themes developed in the
fi rst contributions in the book, particularly my own on acoustic space, and
like Spurrs essay she connects the linguistic and intrapsychic dimensions
of space.
The last two contributions in this collection also look back toward the
fi rst series of chapters on spatial perception in its most concrete sense, as
they investigate the space that Joyce himself pored over as he was writing,
the space of his manuscript pages as well as that of the pages of Thoms
Directory he consulted when writing Ulysses. Contributing to the debate
on the representation of Dublin in Ulysses, Sam Slote observes the essential
part played by Thoms in Joyces rendering of his native city, to conclude
that Joyce presents us in fact with an already textualized city, and an
ineluctably errant representation. Indeed, Slote investigates the numerous errors in Thoms, which leads him to see in the directory an inevitably
erroneous mediation, and further, to observe the consequent imperfection
of the established texts of Ulysses, since many editorial interventions rely
upon topographical veracity. We come to see how the relation between
space and language, and between topography and typography, remains
problematic even in the transmission of Joyces texts, in establishing the
very paperspace he would have wanted to set before our eyes.
The last chapter in our collection, Daniel Ferrers evocation of Joyces
writing space, also investigates Joyces writing habits: it takes its departure
from this very metaphor of paperspace, which he interprets quite literally as the space that Joyce most gazed atthe space of his manuscripts
and notebooks.39 Ferrer gives a fascinating account of the mechanism and
dynamics of Joyces writing, leading us to the very heart of the transubstantiating process of literature, by describing the layout of these manuscripts,
the revisions, the expansions, the occupation of space on the page, and particularly the relation between the basic text and the marginal material. He
interrogates this marginal space as the limit between the text and its other
(including the external sources and their treatment in Joyces notebooks),
revelatory of the relation between the text and its own becoming. Ferrers