Joyce’s Ghosts by Luke Gibbons review: unlocking dead’s voices in James Joyce

Joyce's Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory

Author: Luke Gibbons

ISBN-13: 978-0226236179

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Guideline Price: £31.5

Unlike Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf, James Joyce does not have a signature prose style. Instead, a dizzying variety of idioms speak through his work: the language of childhood at the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the inflated rhetoric of chauvinistic nationalism in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses, the anxious, straining-for-respectability speech of the Edwardian lower middle classes in Dubliners. Joyce is a medium through whom other voices speak; this makes his writing at once democratic and difficult, at once realist and oddly close to the supernatural.

In Joyce's Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory, Luke Gibbons takes the idea of the ghost as a way to unlock for us the secrets of Joyce's many-voiced writing.

In defending his theory that Hamlet is a “ghoststory”, Stephen Dedalus says: “What is a ghost? One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.”

A first ghost is Dublin, a place which ought, through the writer’s long absence from it, to have “faded into impalpability”. Here Gibbons addresses the fundamental question of to whom Joyce’s writing is addressed: which is the authentic experience of the text, the local insider who knows her way from Mulligan’s to Davy Byrne’s, or the outsider who finds herself lost in a Modernist sea of mysterious references?

Both, says Gibbons, because one way or another the experience of Joyce's fictional world is troubled and "haunted" by its real-life counterpart off the page, whether for natives who are always comparing it with the city they know or for foreigners anxious that they are not getting things. The apparitions of the dead throughout Ulysses, such as Bloom's son Rudy or Stephen's mother, Gibbons writes, "impinge upon the lives of the characters in Ulysses much as the presence of Dublin 'off stage' unsettles the text of the novel".

Much of the genius of Dubliners comes from Joyce's use of "free indirect discourse", whereby an apparently objective narrative voice is shaped and coloured by the world view and diction of the character being talked about. The example often given is the first line of The Dead: "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet", where "literally" is something Lily herself would say, even though she is not actually speaking here. Gibbons sees free indirect discourse as a form of haunting, where one idiom uncannily manifests itself within another, the third-person narrator thus becoming something like a psychic medium possessed by ghostly voices.

Irish innovation

In one of the most brilliant moments in the book, Gibbons develops this idea to historicise Joyce’s pioneering use of free indirect discourse as a specifically Irish innovation: “Language in much nineteenth-century Irish fiction can be seen as a struggle for legitimacy between vernacular idioms and dominant discourses intent on keeping colloquialisms in their place – whether quarantined in dialogue, in italics, or through the isolating device of quotation marks.”

Thus, where it might seem that the incorporation of the uneducated or pretentious speech styles of characters in Dubliners sets up a knowing, even mocking bond between author and reader at the expense of the characters, Gibbons makes the opposite claim. These humble voices are refusing to be merely represented as local colour and instead stake their claim on universality, staging an occupation, as it were, of the supposedly neutral voice of authority: "As vernacular energies gathered political momentum through the protracted Land Wars of the nineteenth century, the idiomatic voice slipped through the nets of dialogue and other modes of containment (italics, quotation marks) to usurp passages in the descriptive narration itself, bearing witness to the increased capacity of a culture to control its enunciation."

Gibbons is similarly fascinated by the way he sees traditional, peasant beliefs in the supernatural world – which lingered longer in Ireland than in industrialised European countries – overlapping and even merging with the modern miracles of gas lighting, electricity and the cinema. One of the most moving parts of Joyce's Ghosts is the analysis of how this anachronistic "haunting" of modernity by outmoded systems of feeling and reasoning is essential to Joyce's singular brand of modernism.

Gibbons’s own book is haunted in turn by insights from psychoanalysis, popular films, Frankfurt School theories of modernity, local history, visual theory and political thought. Multitudes of critical voices are given room to say their piece. There are few works of literary scholarship as heterogeneous in their reach or as generously attuned to the ideas of others. Yet the book is finally built on literary criticism at its most basic and brilliant: close reading. Gibbons has an extraordinary eye for clusters of association, the kind of details which cumulatively imprint themselves on to readers’ unconscious minds.

Emblematic ghost

Few works of fiction have been as picked over and interpreted as

The Dead

, yet Gibbons’s magnificent close readings of the story will startle and excite even jaded Joyceans. The key preoccupation which propels the reader through

Joyce’s Ghosts

is the idea that a ghost is a manifestation of a loss which we have failed to come to terms with. Gibbons returns again and again to

The Dead

because Gretta Conroy’s dead lover, Michael Furey, is the emblematic ghost in this regard.

In Gibbons's reading, however, it turns out that ghosts are everywhere in The Dead, right from Gabriel's arrival at the party: "A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds."

Gibbons links this escaping air to the gasworks where we learn Michael Furey worked, to the gaslamp which shines into the hotel room where Gretta tells the story of her lost lover, to the musical air, The Lass of Aughrim, which first brings his spectre to her mind. The cold air emanating from Gabriel's body also suggests that he, too, is in some ways on the way to becoming a ghost, as he will reflect in the closing passage of the story: "One by one, they were all becoming shades."

The idea that a ghost is a sign of an unprocessed loss applies to the Irish language too. Its second life as a revived national tongue fills Gabriel with a sense of inadequacy and dread in an argument with a Gaelic Leaguer, but Gibbons shows how it haunts the story from the start, in the “three syllables” which Lily gives the name “Conroy”, for example.

These ghosts in The Dead – Michael Furey, the Irish language, Gretta as a young woman – haunt Gabriel by calling forth feelings and fears which were hidden inside him. For Gibbons, this psychoanalytic idea of ghosts – externalised forms of private thoughts – is fundamental to fiction itself.

Proust writes: “In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.” That is also what Gibbons’s dazzlingly erudite book does for readers of Joyce, bringing into the light of interpretation the many murky voices – of history, culture, technology, repressed thoughts – that speak to and within us whenever we read Joyce.

All of the great movements in literary theory have taken Joyce's writing as a major battlefield on which to stake out their ground. This can at times make scholarship on Joyce read a bit like what Americans call "insider baseball". Joyce's Ghosts is thoroughly different, a deeply original work which does not have a quotable, one-line "argument" or "claim". It is part of a refreshing new wave of literary criticism that is written in clear, hospitable prose, driven by genuine passion, more concerned with illuminating readers than with winning them over.

Barry McCrea's most recent book is Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe