For James Joyce, perhaps the most crucial of all human faculties was memory. It represented both the central thread of identity and a looking glass into the past. It served as an avenue into other minds, an essential part of the process of literary composition and narration, and the connective tissue of cultural tradition. In Joyce’s Book of Memory John S. Rickard demonstrates how Joyce’s body of work— Ulysses in particular—operates as a “mnemotechnic,” a technique for preserving and remembering personal, social, and cultural pasts. Offering a detailed reading of Joyce and his methods of writing, Rickard investigates the uses of memory in Ulysses and analyzes its role in the formation of personal identity. The importance of forgetting and repression, and the deadliness of nostalgia and habit in Joyce’s paralyzed Dublin are also revealed. Noting the power of spontaneous, involuntary recollection, Rickard locates Joyce’s mnemotechnic within its historical and philosophical contexts. As he examines how Joyce responded to competing intellectual paradigms, Rickard explores Ulysses ’ connection to medieval, modern, and (what would become) postmodern worldviews, as well as its display of tensions between notions of subjective and universal memory. Finally, Joyce’s Book of Memory illustrates how Joyce distilled subjectivity, history, and cultural identity into a text that offers a panoramic view of the modern period. This book will interest students and scholars of Joyce, as well as others engaged in the study of modern and postmodern literature. “By reading Joyce’s concept of memory within the context of the current cultural studies movement, Rickard has deepened the idea and made it more flexible. Although a number of critics have explored this subject in one way or another, Rickard’s is easily the richest and most thorough treatment. ”—R.B. Kershner, University of Florida “I am dazzled by what Rickard has accomplished. He articulates an approach to Joyce’s canon remarkably different from any previously published. This study will profoundly influence the next generation of Joyce scholars.”—Michael Patrick Gillespie, Marquette University “The most comprehensive and convincing treatment of its subject to date. . . . Joyce’s Book of Memory is one of those studies that actually changes the way one thinks about its subject; indeed, it is one of the best new books on Ulysses in recent memory.” -- Brian W. Shaffer ― English Literature in Transition "By reading Joyce's concept of memory within the context of the current cultural studies movement, Rickard has deepened the idea and made it more flexible. Although a number of critics have explored this subject in one way or another, Rickard's is easily the richest and most thorough treatment. "--R.B. Kershner, University of Florida John S. Rickard is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Bucknell University. Joyce's Book of Memory The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses By John S. Rickard Duke University Press Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-2170-5 Contents Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1 Personal Memory and the Construction of the Self, 2 The Past as Obstruction, 3 Memory, Destiny, and the Limits of the Self, 4 Joyce's Mnemotechnic: Textual Memory in Ulysses, 5 Intertextual Memory, Conclusion, Appendix: "Nausicaa" and The Golden Ass, I. Possible References to The Golden Ass in the Notes, Notesheets, Revisions, and Text of "Nausicaa", II. Echoes of The Golden Ass in "Nausicaa", Notes, Bibliography, CHAPTER 1 Personal Memory and the Construction of the Self The traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, into one stable somebody—FW 107 From his earliest writings through Finnegans Wake, the nature of personal identity is a central question in Joyce's work. As a künstlerroman, Joyce's A Portrait focuses on a young artist's attempts to "find himself," in terms of vocation, of course, but also, literally, in terms of his establishing a coherent sense of self. Ulysses also confronts its characters with the most fundamental questions about the nature of identity, about our ability or inability to consider the changing collections of events, sensations, and thoughts that make up the histories of our bodies and minds as stable, unified selves. No discussion of the role of memory in Ulysses can begin without our questioning the nature of subjectivity in Joyce's novel and the role of memory in constructing or deconstructing identity. Joyce's writing has been valorized by traditional humanist critics for its reification of consciousness through the stream-of-consciousness technique, for its creation of a modern everyman in Leopold Bloom, ennobled by his connection with the mythic Odysseus, and so on. On the other hand, Joyce's writing is held up by poststructuralist readers as an exemplary site for what Hélène Cixous calls "discred