Notes
An early contribution on this theme is Sydney Feshbach's essay “Literal/Littoral/Littorananima: The Figure on the Shore in the Works of James Joyce” (1985); additionally noteworthy are, among others, Katharina Hagena's monography Developing Waterways. Das Meer als sprachbildendes Element im Ulysses von James Joyce (1996), Robert Adam Day's essay “Joyce's AquaCities” (1996), Roberta Gefter Wondrich's article “The Marine and Watery Element from Dubliners to Ulysses” (2006) and John Brannigan's chapter “James Joyce and the Irish Sea” in his recent volume Archipelagic Modernism (2015).
Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth. Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. New York: Oxford UP, 2012, p. 2.
Joyce is if course not the only writer ascribable to this category; another name that must be mentioned is undoubtedly that of Virginia Woolf. In novels such as The Voyage Out (1915) and To the Lighthouse (1927), this relationship (adolescence/sea/arrested development) is outlined in the same way, even though Woolf's characters often have social and cultural backgrounds that differ from those of the Joycean protagonists.
As Joyce famously stated in a letter to his editor Grant Richards, Dubliners should represent “a chapter of the moral history of my country,” that he presents “under four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order” (qtd Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Seamus Deane. London: Penguin Books, 2000, p. xxxi).
Casarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis. Minneapolis [et al.]: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 10.
Ibid.
Pearson, Nels C. “'May I trespass on your valuable space?': Ulysses on the Coast.” Modern Fiction Studies. 57.4 (2011): 627- 649; p. 628.
Casarino, op. cit., p. 4.
Ibid., p. 10.
Esty, op. cit., p. 22.
Ibid., p. 5.
Castle, Gregory. Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. Gainesville [et al.]: UP of Florida, 2006, p. 1.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., p. 71.
Ibid.
Namely the exotic picaresque and the Bildungsroman of the sea. (cf. Casarino, op. cit., p. 7).
Casarino, Cesare, op. cit, p. 9.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics. 16:1 (Spring 1986). 22 – 27; p. 24.
Ibid., p. 27.
Casarino, op. cit., p. 13.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin [et al.]: University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 84.
Ibid., p. 85.
Cohen, Margaret. “The Chronotopes of the Sea.” The Novel. Volume 2: Forms and Themes. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006, p. 648.
Apart from the ship, another maritime chronotope that undergoes an equally significant transformation is that of the sea-shore. Research on this topic has been carried out by, among others, Kasia Boddy in her article “Modern Beach” (2007), Roberta Gefter Wonrdich in the essay “'these heavy sands are language': the beach as a cultural signifier from Dover Beach to On Chesil Beach” (2012), Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris in a co-edited volume Modernism on Sea (2010) and, more recently, Ursula Kluwick and Virginia Richter in The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (2015).
Casarino, op. cit., p. 28.
Cohen, op. cit., p. 664.
Conrad, Joseph. “Youth.” The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 2007, p. 146 (emphasis added).
Conrad, Joseph. The Shadow-Line. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997, p. 49.
Brannigan, John. Archipelagic Modernism. Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890 – 1970. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015, p. 69.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Seamus Deane. London: Penguin Books, 2000, p. 31.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 33.
Brannigan, John. Archipelagic Modernism. Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015, p. 71.
Casarino, op. cit., p. 16.
Joyce, Dubliners, op. cit., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 13. Originally a military dock situated on a peninsula in Ringsend, a suburb on the south bank of Dublin port. It was turned into an electricity power station in 1897 (cf Ibid., p. 247, fn 19).
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 12.
Brannigan, op. cit., p. 71.
Joyce, Dubliners, op. cit., p. 15.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 18. This detail eloquently contributes to the already mentioned negative representation of mariners in Joyce, as I will further comment in the following section.
Ibid., p. 20.
Brannigan, op. cit., p. 72.
Ibid.
As it is defined by Esty in his eponymous study.
Brannigan, op. cit., p. 76.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage Books, 1986, p. 550.
cf. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, op. cit., p. 264.
Brannigan, op. cit., p. 78.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, op. cit., p. 69.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Castle, op. cit., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid.
Joyce, A Portrait, op. cit., p. xiii.
Ibid., p. 268 – 269.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 275.
Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 5.
Ibid.
As it is known, the action in Ulysses takes place during one single day, 16th June 1904.
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, op. cit., p. 220.
Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 16.
Brannigan, op. cit., p. 85.
Ibid., p. 86.
Cf. Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 42.
Brannigan, op. cit., p. 86.
Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 511.
Cohen, “The Chronotopes of the Sea.” The Novel. Volume 2: Forms and Themes, op. cit., p. 665.
Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 509.
Ibid., p. 519. Incidentally, Bloom's remark can easily be read as a testimony of the decline that the literary genre of the sea-adventure tales was facing in those decades, as I have already pointed out.
Cohen, “The Chronotopes of the Sea.” The Novel. Volume 2: Forms and Themes, op. cit., p. 665.
Ibid.
Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 516.
Ibid., p. 538. Curiously enough, the “confused notion” (D 15) that the young protagonist of “An Encounter” had with regard to sailors having green eyes, is again transmuted in a degraded manner here; this old mariner has little to do with the prototypical figure of an heroic seafarer (just as does the sordid “queer old josser” (D 18), notwithstanding his green eyes).
Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 31.
Cf. Brannigan, op. cit., p. 92.
Joyce, Ulysses, op. cit., p. 37.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 40. The words are actually read, but not understood, by Bloom in the “Nausicaa” episode, while he is walking on Sandymount Strand.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 40; emphasis added.
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