Joyce, Woolf, and Literary Cities (Week 4 extra)

Literary Geography: Joyce, Woolf and the City

• The chapter will discuss the city in literature, focusing on Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
• It will look at how urban landscapes are depicted in their works

Woolf and the City

• Virginia Woolf said, "A writer's country is a territory within his own brain"
• Cities in literature are imaginative constructions separate from their real counterparts
• Insisting that a writer's city has a counterpart in the real world diminishes its charm
• Woolf's statement emphasized the imaginative and internal nature of a writer's creation of place

Joyce and the City

• James Joyce stated, "I want 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"
• Joyce wanted to accurately reflect the material reality of Dublin in his writing
• His goal was for Dublin to be rebuilt from his book if it were ever destroyed

Cities in Literature

• Cities in literature can represent something other than themselves or at least themselves and their particular material histories
• The idea that places in literature represent something other than themselves has more support from critics and theorists
• Space in literature is often interpreted as temporality or narrative events
• Franco Moretti saw the physical city as a backdrop to social relationships and narrative temporality
• Moretti argued that the novel reveals the meaning of the city through a temporal trajectory
• The urban novel resolves the spatial in terms of the sequential

Literary Criticism

• J. Hillis Miller viewed a novel as a figurative mapping
• Miller saw the story as tracing the movement of characters and creating an imaginary space
• Houses, roads, paths, and walls in a novel represent the dynamic field of relations among characters

Raymond Williams on the City

• Raymond Williams argued that the city communicates an ideology of the individual within a community
• In Ulysses, the forces of the action become internal, and the city is only in the walker's mind
• Williams saw history as the loss of a city and relationships
• Knowable community is in the need and desire of racing and separated forms of consciousness
• Cities in literature stand for something other than themselves, representing a network of relationships

Simmel and Urban Life

• Social theorist George Simmel's ideas are that the significance of the city lies in its effect on mental life and relationships of those who live there
• Cities never signify themselves, but theirs is never a meaning per se but always a meaning for

Irony

• There is something particularly ironic about Williams's remark about Ulysses "the forces of the action have become internal and in a way there is no longer a city, there is only a man walking through it"
• The remark is ironic as it ignores Joyce's own insistence on the fidelity of his representation to material fact

Woolf

• The Woolf who wrote The Years in the 1930s had changed significantly in her attitudes towards the meaning of the city
• This change occurred in her literature from the young woman who wrote in 1905 against turning "such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar"

Dubliners

• As early as 1905, Joyce would defend Dubliners as being about Dublin, a city worthy of representation, saying "When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the "second" city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world"
• Because when writing the stories he was not in Dublin, but in Trieste and Rome, he constantly bombarded his brother Stanislaus with questions about the precise particularities of Dublin's fabric

Ulysses, Dublin, and Accuracy

• When asked regarding Ulysses, Joyce asked about the city ambulance would be called out to Sydney Parade for an accident and asked whether such an accident would be treated at Vincent's Hospital
• He requested that his Aunt send an Xmas present made up of tramtickets, advts, handbills, posters, papers, programmes &c and said he would like to have a map of Dublin on his wall
• He saw himself as becoming something of a maniac

Eccles Street

• Writing Ulysses, he asked: can an ordinary person climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles street, either from the path or the steps
• Questioned trees in Leahy's terrace at the side or near and whether there are steps leading down to the beach

Composition

• He relied on Thom's Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Dublin section, 1904 edition when writing
• The directory aided him in accurately placing the shops, museums, libraries, pubs, cemeteries, schools, churches, breweries, tearooms, turkish baths, bookshops

Wandering Rocks

• So accurately are the geographical dimensions of Dublin rendered that one critic could take a stopwatch and walk each of the separate fragments of Wandering Rocks.
• Wandering Rocks is the most 'urban' of the 18 episodes of Ulysses
• Each narrative fragment as written would intersect with others so exactly that they could be precisely chronologically charted

Rejections

• From the beginning, Joyce was insistent on providing the exact dimensions of Dublin in his work
• He refused to change to fictional real names of actual pubs, restaurants, railway companies
• Irish publisher for Dubliners demanded he change the real names and the publisher was rejected for libel

Joyce and Errors

• Claimed a man of genius makes no mistakes as his errors are volitional, serving as 'portals of discovery'
• An example is typified by the Kildare House
• Making the correction in 1917, Joyce adds a fillip from the political history of Ireland
• Creates not only a story of sexual treachery and betrayal, but one which echoes Ireland's history of betrayal

Characters

• Through the Dublin streets, Lenehan and Corley in 'Two Gallants', resemble the Garrison (British troops stationed in Ireland) and even their (passive, supporting) Irish selves
• Joyce's political critique targets the Irish and the British to the extent that they remain, as a narrator says, "gratefully oppressed"
• If Lenehan shamelessly exemplifies slack and indifferent nineteenth-century Irishry that stands by as the nation is defrauded, then Corley is rightly identified as the active force in bringing that nation willingly to her knees and getting paid for it to boot

Harp

• He adds even greater historical texture to the tale by carefully orchestrating their movements and this can be found when the two men move through a Dublin redolent with the history of The Garrison and the history of The Ascendancy at its height, through streets and past buildings
• Buildings bear the names of those who, particularly in the period of the Ascendancy's greatest strength, not only 'oppressed' Ireland but were rewarded for doing so
• The harp, always feminized, represents Ireland herself and is 'mournful', 'heedless', and 'weary'
• It is weary of being used alike by strangers and by 'her master's hands'

Politics

• When they 'walk along Nassau Street and then turn into Kildare Street', they pass the club near the porch of which stands the harper playing to those in the community
• With Lenehan and Corley, Joyce echoes the history of this political betrayal in the walk in "Two Gallants", unfolded through Joyce's detail

Topography

• Joyces details show Ireland's political and social history
• Ulysses has Stephen referring that 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake'

Ulysses and Material History

• Joyce very insistence on fidelity to material history means that Ulysses, for all its urban character, presents its central characters through situations less metropolitan than provincial
• Demonstrates effects of mental life
• Both urban theorists were keen to stress the effects on the individual of having to cope with a density of population
• When he meets Leopold Bloom, Ulysses's own flâneur, it is because he is 'out of the centre', he is a Jew and a Catholic
• The text is more cosmopolitan than metropolitan

Dublin and London

• Dublin, kicking and screaming, into cosmopolitan Europe
• All of the characters in Ulysses know each other
• The Dublin in Ulysses is not that of a great metropolis, but those of a large village
• London has nearly 20 times the population of Dublin
• This is why, when the Aeolus episode of Ulysses presents us with a headline announcing that we are 'IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS' we recognize it as satire

Woolfs Ficiton

• In her fiction Virginia Woolf displayed nothing like Joyce's obsessive insistence on getting the facts of the material city right
• She repeatedly situated her fictions in the urban space of London
• In addition, her letters and diaries are saturated with accounts of the city's enticements for her
• London is enchanting and step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet that connects to beauty
• Nights include white porticos and broad silent avenues
• People pop in and out lightly, divertingly like rabbits and I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal's back or red and yellow with sunshine, and watch the omnibuses going and coming and hear the old crazy organs