Memory Ireland. James Joyce and Cultural Memory. The admonition to remember is implicit in Irish historyβfrom the call to remember the siege of Derry and the battle of the Boyne, to the traumatic memory of the Famine, to the commemoration of nationalist martyrs, capped by the Rising of , an historical spectacle that seemed designed to produce cultural memory as metonymies of the Irish nation.
Bardic literature was an intrinsically historical record, and later poetry, particularly the allegorical aisling , encoded history into cultural memory. The first three volumes of the Memory Ireland series, edited by Oona Frawley, dealt with many of these facets of Irish cultural memory and its relation to history. The fourth and final volume under review here is a case study of James Joyce.
Contributor Len Platt explains just how committed Joyce studies is to historical criticism and why we should read his texts through the conceptual lens of memory. Following Pierre Nora, dean of memory studies, who links cultural memory to crises in national development, Platt sees Finnegans Wake 3. However, he appears to be comparing very different things. Christ revised all that came before him upon his arrival, but Joyce seems only to have disparaged realism. Memory and history bring the past into the present and lay the groundwork for the future in very different ways.
Personal memory in Joyce is often traumatic memory. The link between memory and aesthetics here established brings with it a moral imperative: certain things are not to be appropriated for art. Like Beplate, Robert Garrett is also concerned with personal memory and personal trauma, which is often occluded by historicist readings of Ulysses. But rather than absorb personal trauma into historical trauma, Garrett wants to reverse the process.
The multiple valences and levels of memory are explored in other essays here, and their conclusions tend to reinforce the traumatic and often confusing space that memory creates through obscurity, vagueness and, sometimes, ghostly doublings and repetitions. What seems like straightforward memorial reflections Gabriel Conroy on his own sense of being misunderstood; his wife Gretta on an early love turn out to be uncertain and ambivalent.
