"Famished Ghosts": Famine Memory in James Joyce's Ulysses

Abstract

Numerous critics of James Joyce have pointed out the apparent absence of the Famine in his work. Noting that he was only one generation removed from the catastrophe, they have used this proximity to support claims that the enormity of the Famine drove many Irish writers into silence. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Terry Eagleton asks, ‘‘Where is the Famine in the literature of the Revival? Where is it in Joyce?’’1 He goes on to suggest that ‘‘If the Famine stirred some to angry rhetoric, it would seem to have traumatized others into muteness. The event strains at the limit of the articulable, and is truly in this sense an Irish Auschwitz.’’ Colm Toibin, in his Irish Famine: A Documentary, writes that the pre-modern quality of the Famine ‘‘puts [it] beyond the reach of writers who came after it; and the speed with which society transformed itself— and perhaps the arrival of the camera—made the history of 1846, 1847 and 1848 in Ireland a set of erasures rather than a set of reminders.’’2 While Eagleton’s question has elicited several answers, these have tended to focus on Joyce’s Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and to ignore Ulysses. In his essay, ‘‘The Memories of ‘The Dead,’ ’’ Kevin Whelan argues that Joyce’s work, ‘‘beneath its calm surface, is pervasively disturbed by the presence of the Famine: The post-Famine condition of Ireland is the unnamed horror at the heart of Joyce’s Irish darkness, the conspicuous exclusion that is saturatingly present as a palpable absence deliberately being held at bay, ‘the terror of soul of a starving Irish village.’ ’’3 Luke Gibbons has argued that in Joyce’s Dublin, memory makes up a phantom public sphere that cannot be contained within the Irish home. Having been dealt a series of concussive shocks by public history and political memory, and with ‘‘no homes to go to,’’ these energies live in the halfway houses of the pub or in the streetwalking culture