Memory, Forgetting, and Joyce in the Third Millennium: Nationalism in the Era of Consumerism

James Joyce aspires in Ulysses to be a topographer of his birthplace and a historiographer of his nation. Such an ambition operates in memory and forgetting, a double mechanism coinciding with that of nationalism. As a gigantic memory tank of Dubliners' everyday life at the turn of the twentieth century, Ulysses celebrates pre-consumerist euphoria as an alternative to nationalist memory to better accommodate otherness in the self. In representing a city in terms of incipient consumerism, Ulysses uncannily anticipates not only what its citizens are to become, but how Joyce is to be received in the first decade of the third millennium. Indeed in her all-too-eager embrace of an affluent, desensitized present with a cosmopolitan interest in otherness for self-interest, Ireland has not only constructed a consumable past to meet its political and commercial needs, but also enshrined Joyce in a compromised cultural memory. While this commercialized memory helps stabilize the present, it also runs the risk of distorting both Joyce and the Irish past, making it harder to understand the present.