3 - Irish Nature, Irish City: The Complexities of Place

Summary

The notion of place could be considered relatively simple in Joyce's writing, given that his major works – Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and even, in a sense, Finnegans Wake – all take place in the city of Dublin, Ireland. But as Michael Seidel indicates in the title of his study of Ulysses, geography and travel in Joyce's work also have an epic dimension. The concept of place therefore signifies a variety of issues, and arguably two of the most worthy of consideration are the ecological and the political. Attention to the role of nature and environment in Irish literary works has been growing since the publication of Tim Wenzell's Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature in 2009, although that work pays considerably more attention to such Joyce contemporaries as Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and A. E. than to Joyce himself. However, with the growing prominence of ecological study in the field of literature, attention to its significance in Joyce's work will continue to grow. I will therefore offer a survey of moments in Joyce's fictions in which the natural world as a setting plays a role, beginning with the poems of Chamber Music. Stephen Dedalus's encounters with nature in Portrait and Ulysses also deserve attention, as does Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses and its echo in ALP's conversation at the end of Finnegans Wake. The coastal nature of Ireland makes the sea an important figure in many of these moments, and yet it is the urban spaces of the city and their effects on human activity that ultimately dominate the role of place in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses, if not Finnegans Wake. Ireland's geography therefore has not only ecological but also political implications. Its structure as an island with bounded and therefore constrained space made it vulnerable to emigration, particularly after such an epic disaster as the Great Famine produced by the potato blight of the mid-nineteenth century. The Dubliners story “Eveline” glosses a version of the emigration dilemmas produced by Irish poverty in the twentieth century, although a play such as Joyce's Exiles offers a rather different perspective on Irish emigration and return.