2) so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron

memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only (James Joyce). Discuss the uses of history AND/OR the relationship between past and present in works by Joyce.

Frank Macpherson 27th January 2013 W1/HT

Abstract: In Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (henceforth Portrait) the narrative structure and technique interact with the influence of time on the representation of the literary self, from an internal and external perspective. This varied between the personal past and historical past, as well as their influence on the present, and connects with the Modernists re-shaping contemporary notions of time. Joyce explores the interplay between different kinds of time, and what they might mean for the present or the future.

In the 1880s William Wundt performed a series of experiments in order to determine the duration of the present1. Joyce was born at the beginning of this decade, and his experiments to re-shape way in which we perceived our personal past as well as our histories and their influence upon us show a similar focus on re-establishing a new relationship between people and their pasts. In order to do this he rejected the Victorian historicism that had left the present seeming pre-determined and smothered by the past2 in favour of a fundamental convulsion of the creative human spirit that seem to topple even the most solid and substantial of our beliefs and assumptions and stimulate frenzied rebuilding3. Whilst the boundaries between the past and the present are not always clear in Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (henceforth Portrait) the difference between the past and history can be brought into focus comparatively: the past specifically referring to the personal past, whilst History as an area of study for Joyces contemporaries was still the study of great men. Furthermore, history entailed entertained the desire for objectivity- whilst the personal past was distinctly subjective by its very nature. Simultaneously present in Joyces statement is the causal relationship between our capricious(ness) and the iron memorial aspect of memory: memory seems to be so stationary because our characters are so changing and we require memory to be as strong and unchanging as this to give a sense of solidity to the presence. In this way the full impact of the reimagining of the past by Joyce can be realised. As the Moderns became more conscious of their independence4 they began to be drawn to the examination of the personal past, as opposed to the historical past, crucially because it was something

1 2

Kerr p82 Kern p61 3 Bradbury and McFarlane p19 4 Bradbury and McFarlane p98 2

over which they might gain some control5. This desire for control is directly manifested in Portrait as Joyce returns to the point someones life when they arguably have least control: infancy. Simultaneously when reading this opening the consciousness of Stephen that a reader adopts when reading the novel is overlaid the background of our own memories6 and recalls both for Stephen and for the reader what it was like to be a child. Once upon a time7 is such a universal opening line for a story that it is probably recognised in the readers own mind. The boundary between past and present is an easy one to distinguish consciously, externally to the text, but unconsciously and intellectually Iser suggests that we are drawing on our own memories and personal past. Yet with Stephen a reader sees them being acted out, and dont know exactly how they affect him in the future. In Portrait Joyce clearly attempts to refute the iron memorial aspect of the past and instead display the fluid succession of presents. Whilst it is impossible to effectively externalise and convey a persons complexities to an outsider Portrait attempts to bestow a sense of the unified single entity8 that is Stephen, and our external perspective allows us to effectively perceive the unity of his previous presents as a synthesised entity. Equally a reader is conscious that all of these memories somehow form a background of memory for Stephen, against which new experiences will be played out, and these will interact in new ways9. Their placement in a text allows us, having read them, to view them almost simultaneously. This entity seen on completing the work could then perhaps be described as Joyces Modernist soul. The language of Portrait is initially sparse and develops as the artist does. At the first paragraph the narrative

5 6

Kern p63 Iser 7 Portrait p5 8 Title Quotation 9 Iser p192 3

voice cannot even initially be distinguished as that of Stephen or as that of his father. Whilst the opening appears to be from the point of view of Stephen himself, the use of the masculine second person pronoun creates a distinct space between the reader and the character. This prevents us from becoming Stephen completely, and yet allows Joyce to develop a sense of supposedly unbeknownst intimacy with Stephen. In being contemporaneous with the development of Freuds notion of the subconscious, the text might also be seen as almost eerie or unhiemlich as we are made privy to the private formative experiences of an individual through his own mind that echo the formative experiences of our own. However this application of unhiemlich may be an overextension depending on how far a reader identifies with Stephen throughout the novel. Yet the Iserian notion of background and foreground memory is in fact echoed by Joyce, albeit to a different end, in his Paris Notebook on Aesthetics: the act of apprehension involves at least two activities, the activity of cognition and the activity of recognition10. This seems to establish firmly Joyces interest in the internal intellectual development of the reader and the role that memory, the subconscious, or in his words a fluid succession of presents plays. Kerns assessment of the thrust of the age establishes this facet of Portrait as a crucial one; part of the contemporary attempt to affirm the reality of private time against that of a single public time and to define its nature as heterogeneous, fluid, and reversible11. Therefore the narrative progression of Portrait is about establishing the bearing of the interior according the exterior. As a whole the work jumps between time frames with no reference or warning, and an events importance within the narrative has little attachment to how long the incident lasted for. An example of this

10 11

Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writings (ed. Barry, OWC 2008) p105 Kern p34 4

is Father Arnells invocation of hell12 and Stephens internal musings on them, where for over 10 pages the reader is embroiled in Stephens inner turmoil with no anchor to his physical movement or the passage of time apart from the knowledge that he is on the walk home. The thick fog (that) seemed to compass his mind becomes a fog of words for the reader. Public time has no importance when the private is faced with such serious questions. Later Stephens Mother has to work out the time for Stephen by straightening the battered clock that was lying on its side in the middle of the kitchen mantelpiece until its dial showed a quarter to twelve and the laid it once more on its side13. Henri Bergsons exposure of fallacies in thinking of time spatially14, such as on the face of a clock is referenced here, as in turn time suggests little order for Stephen who is then late to his lectures. Bergson also developed a theory of relative and absolute time in his An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). The manipulation of the clock in Portrait is an example of relative time, as it is impoverishedachieved by coming to know it (the object) through symbols or words that fail to render its true nature15. This might equally be applied to Joyces Dubliners that is only coming to know whatever it aims to show by moving around the object16. Equally whilst initially Dubliners less experimental narrative might imply that it is an example of the past in its iron memorial aspect. However its snapshot stories also might be described as a fluid succession of presents in that they entice us to develop a unity between them, despite their different characters. When a memory is recalled, the mind visualises it in a way that attempts to replay or relive it and equally the conscious mind seemingly has no

12 13

Joyce p91 Joyce p146 14 Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 15 Kern p25 16 Ibid p25 5

control over the memories that are recalled- just as Dubliners refuses to allow satisfyingly cohesive links between the individual stories to develop, and yet presents them as a single entity in volume form. This rapid cutting and freedom of movement might recall cinema. In the early stages of movies being shown to a consumer audience, no conventional story was deemed necessary as the way in which images were sped up, slowed down and cut together was enough to attract audiences. This persisted until the late 1920s, as Vertovs Man With A Movie Cameras fragmented narrative shows. Joyce also managed the first cinema in Dublin, so clearly showed at least an interest in film although it is difficult to know how far this can be allowed to feature in an analysis of his work. At the end of Portrait the novel takes diary form. 6th April: Certainly she remembers the past. Lynch says all women do. Then she remembers the time of her childhood- and mine if I was ever a child. Statues of women, if Lynch be right, should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling regretfully her nether parts17. In taking the diary format, this pretends to be an account of the past written in the present. The implication is that these thoughts come directly from the character as he writes. At this point, it is almost as Stephen has become a character in his own right and is slowly escaping the world of text, as this form suddenly makes the distinction between reader and narrative voice much sharper but carries with it the readers background knowledge of Stephen as Baby Tuckoo. The diary form might be seen to be consuming the present of the narrator and representing it as past text- in which sense it is as close to the fluid succession of presents as it is perhaps possible to be. It is unclear whether his questioning of whether she remembers the time of her childhood- and mine if I was ever a child is intended to be a joke based on how

17

Joyce p211 6

altered he is from childish innocence, or whether it carries in it a grain of truth that he cannot remember his early childhood- and yet the reader can hold these successive presents in unity even as the narrator can not. In framing the phrase within the diary format he acknlowedges the constant absorbtion of the present into memory as well as effectively transposing the idea of successive presents into literary form as each entry is clearly labelled with its date. Juxtaposed with Lynchs comments about statues of women, the reader is equally reminded of how quickly this abstract questioning of the nature of time and memory is itself forgotten by more immediate concerns. Therefore Joyce's work is drawn together by his desire to escape and even redefine the conventional notions of time. In this he was representative of the Modernists in general, but also to re-shape the readers expectation of how they viewed and interacted with the personal past, and by implication the historical past. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might be read as a slow layering of successive presents until upon its ending the reader can view a completed entity. It almost seems to push at its confinement to text, as the reader partially absorbs the completed entity and its successive presents alongside its own, and they have the potential to become jumbled.