In the course of this book, I have suggested ways in which the representative fictions of Joyce and Dos Passos constitute a poetics of transatlantic urban modernism in which the rhetoric of the metropolis is transformed into a Weltstadt: a topos of the imagination where the city becomes the world. As a cultural sign, the modernist city is the essential ground of modern existence, the context of modern life an urban one, and modern consciousness an urban consciousness. At the same time, in the diaphonous intersection of the politics of locality with the legacies of cultural and historical myth, the assumptions and conceptual models employed by Joyce and Dos Passos serve dissimilar ends. Whereas Joyce offers us ultimately a humanely affirmative yet skeptical vision of the subjective moral history of Ireland, Dos Passos’ naturalist history of America sets itself against society, presenting a more ambivalent conception of the individual within mass society.
When in 1904 George W.Russell (A.E.) urged Joyce write an innocuous piece for The Irish Homestead, it was with the intention that the young writer could easily write for money by way of playing to the common understandings, social mores, and cultural expectations of a provincial nation languishing on the margins of European culture. “The Sisters,” however, while earning Joyce his one pound in payment, subverted the very expectations Russell admonished his fellow Dubliner to conform to, setting in motion a bold conception of modernity predicated on a biological theory of society. But the artistic progression from Dubliners to Portrait to Ulysses suggests that Joyce’s mapping of the urban aggregate as symptomatic of an endemic paralysis produced in time a progressive amelioration of that original vision, indeed of Joyce’s reconciliation with Dublin as a city in history.
In My Brother’s Keeper, Stanislaus Joyce defines his brother’s transcendent passion for a father, city, and nation as synonymous with “the comprehending love of an artist for his subject”:
The two dominant passions of my brother’s life were to be love of father and of fatherland. The latter was not the love of a patriot, which is an emotion for the market-place, part hatred of some other country, part falsehood. It was the comprehending love of an artist for his subject. Both passions stemmed, I believe, from his ancient love of God, and were already at that time spreading tough roots underground in a most unpropitious climate: love of his country, or rather of his city, that was to reject him and his work; love of his father, who was like a mill-stone round his neck. The roots of feeling in some men sink all the deeper for the difficulties that surround and frustrate them; and I wonder that people do not see how much higher than the divine love, which is the preacher’s theme, is that human passion which can love an unworthy object utterly without return and forgive without waiting to be supplicated.1
For Stanislaus, the seed of his brother’s relationship with Dublin, sown fast on the hard ground of family and nation, drove its roots down into the soil of a deeper, more spiritual and ancient passion for the land and people of his birth. Moreover, the life Stanislaus eulogizes here is the very existence Joyce chose for himself from the beginning: the artist as secular Christ who comes into the world not to create the city of God but to liberate the city of Man. However, while the desire for liberation manifests itself primarily in the chronicling of urban alienation, it is precisely the paradox of the self-exiled artist’s warring love-hate relationship with Dublin that remains vital to our understanding of the importance of Joyce’s modernist poetics
By contrast, Dos Passos never fully reconciled himself to New York’s soul-destroying texture, a city that in his mind represented American history betrayed. But the paradoxical nature of Dos Passos’ own vision of the city, like that of Joyce, is intrinsic to a larger understanding of his cultural project. In Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos’ romantic and entropic landscape constitutes an attempt to give back to industrial society a sense of its own cultural memory. But in the course of destabilizing outmoded nineteenth-century literary conventions to make way for a new language of modernity, the American cityscape is defined for the most part by the skein of life in the form of actions and surfaces as opposed to the psychological studies Joyce presents throughout his work. However, while Manhattan Transfer may well appear bitter at times, Dos Passos later defended the moral tenor of his vision as a function of its larger satirical purpose: “the satirist is so full of the possibilities of human kind in general that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment.”2
By way of a closing comment, I would like to consider two interrelated components that play a central part in the literary construction of Joyce’s Dublin and Dos Passos’ New York: the role of memory and the act of remembrance. While memory can be regarded as a faculty in the service of a structuring imagination, both memory and remembrance are, finally, indentured to a selective imagination. In particular, I would like to suggest that in reading Joyce and Dos Passos remembering Dublin and New York, from within and without the city as well as across time and space, three factors affect our reception of these texts as functions of memory. In the first instance, and perhaps rather obviously, memory is highly selective. As with a photograph, the text as a literary image can tell us as much—in both positive and negative terms—about what is inside the frame as much as it fails to tell us about what is outside. At the same time, memory is reconstructive. The nature of memory is such that it is not merely a passive reproduction of past actualities but a reconstructive experience. A form of mental notation, therefore, memory enables us to convince ourselves of what, finally, must have occurred. In memory, experience also is encoded in order that it may later be retrieved. The reconstructive nature of memory also leads us to perhaps another rather obvious conclusion: the act of memory is often contaminated. Memory, surely, reinstates the immediacy of emotions and experience. More importantly, memory, as far as the retrieval process allows, reconstructs the context of the event and/or emotion related to that event as we remember it. The text, therefore, as a function of memory and as an act of remembrance, institutes a retrieval path that enables the reader to be “present” in the textual recall of history.
Moreover, unlike the organic nature of memory, the act of remembrance is a more “holistic” experience; not only do we re-experience the traces of memory in their different forms when we remember, but we are also able to relate those parts to a larger whole in terms of how we recover, reconstruct, and re-present the past. There is, of course, always more in remembrance than we can ever tell (the “world” outside the frame); in addition, there is always far more attached to memory than can ever be assessed at one time. In the case of Joyce’s and Dos Passos’ respective reconstitutions of the past, their fictional representations function as both memory and as an acts of remembrance. These can never, of course, be fully recovered. And if we add one final factor to our contemplation, that is the issue of perspective, that is the point at which and from where these writers engage in retrieving the past, then the mechanics of representation and the chronicling history surely become even more complex.
What then can we say about the city and memory? I would like to propose that the city is both memory and essential ground for modern life, and that when we read urban fictions we not only recover a sense of collective urban history, but also perceive more clearly our own relationship with the cities in which we live by way of imagination. In other words, we remember (or even foreshadow) our own lives in symbolic ways that enrich our lives in the present. Representations of cities are not simply portraits of the past consigned to museums of the literary imagination. When Karl Marx questioned the possibility of the city ceasing to exist, he was predicting the eventual passing away of the capitalist state as it was embodied in the oppressive nineteenth-century industrial metropolis. And while it may appear to many in our own time that the post-industrial city has exhausted its original function as the triumph of Reason over Nature, the city as a fundamental way of experiencing life is as present to us today as its demise, ironically, was Marx’s hope for a more egalitarian future.