On Ulysses: Bergson and Memory Representation

The writer James Joyce and the philosopher Henri Bergson both died in January 1941. Aside from the timing of their deaths, these thinkers were connected by their influence on the Modernist conception of memory and its relation to everyday, conscious experience. In Ulysses, Joyce innovated the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, which Patrick Hogan defines as an integration of interior monologue with “parallel processes of perception” including emotions, semantic associations, and memories (Hogan 2014, 108). Similarly, Bergson critiques the traditional spatial view of memory and time, favoring a formulation of memory modeled after his theory of Duration in Matter and Memory.

By discussing memory representation, this essay seeks to use Bergson’s ideas to better understand the literary style of Ulysses. I will begin by outlining the primary thesis of Matter and Memory’s second chapter: that there are two forms of memory retrieval, voluntary and habitual, that obscure our relationship with “pure” or “spontaneous” memory. Joyce uses these forms to shape his characters’ inner lives, and I will discuss how they manifest in Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, respectively, in the first half of Ulysses. My purpose is not to causally link the writings of Bergson and Joyce, as Wyndham Lewis did when he wrote that Bergson had planted “the little seed” that created Ulysses (Lewis 1928, 115). Rather, I aim to simply explore the correspondences between their works that place them within the same movement as other Modernists like Proust, Picasso, and Woolf.

In Reconfiguring Modernism, Professor Daniel Schwarz describes Modernism’s multifaceted, Cubist approach to the self, with an interest in how “we lack a coherent identity” (Schwarz 1997, 9) and seek to represent that fragmentation in art. He exemplifies this desire for understanding consciousness by quoting Bergson’s description of Duration in Creative Evolution, which asks: “…what is our character, if not the condensation of the history we have lived from our birth…?” (Bergson 1944, 7) In Matter and Memory, Bergson redefines human memory in terms of Duration, a synchronous view of time as a heterogeneous, continuous, and interdependent series of moments rather than discrete states in space. He sought to find compromise between the British empiricists John Locke, who models memory as a passive storage that totally defines personal identity, and David Hume, who portrays the self as constantly fluctuating and memory as an illusory source of stable identity (Rickard 1998, 22). Bergson sees memory as the water that flows in the stream of consciousness. For him the River Liffey stays as the River Liffey from day to day, even if it changes in composition from moment to moment (ibid, 31).

One’s past does not disappear. Rather, it actively accumulates in an unconscious, virtual network of memory-images that Bergson called pure or spontaneous memory. Duration of consciousness is contracted in this pure memory and is synthesized with an ever-changing present to create an undivided whole. Bergson believed that this condensation of one’s entire life history was a non-teleological force, what he called the élan vital, which drives what one desires, wills, and acts (Perri 2017, 514). However, this past can be forgotten. Bergson argued that one’s awareness of pure memory, and therefore access to one’s true character, is narrowed down by action. Specifically, he observed that modern people are alienated from their pasts because of the restraints of overly intellectual, voluntary memory and limited, bodily habit memory (Bergson 1962, 145).

This is where Bergson’s philosophy and Joyce’s narrative style interact. As Professor Schwarz writes in Reading Joyce’s Ulysses, “style [is] inseparable from what it does to the events and characters it describes and what it does to the reader” (Schwarz 1987, 3) which is important because “reading is an extension of how we perceive and understand the events in our lives.” (ibid, 5) Therefore, Ulysses is a novel that teaches us how to read differently by modeling its language after the phenomenology of thoughts, memories, and emotions in the minds of ordinary people like Stephen and Bloom.

In a way, Ulysses is a “retrospective arrangement” (U.75; VI.150) about two men in mourning. They are haunted by ghosts of the past; Bloom by his long dead son Rudy and Stephen by his recently deceased mother. Throughout the novel, both characters are challenged to reconcile their painful memories, which eventually erupt from the subconscious in “Circe,” like the drowning man that Stephen fears will resurface from Dublin Bay (U.38; I.328). Ultimately, Stephen and Bloom never achieve the uninhibited stream of spontaneous memories manifested in Molly’s soliloquy. It is the restraints placed on their relationships with the past, Stephen by voluntary memory and Bloom by habit memory, that alienates them from the entirety of their memories and consequently, from their coherent selves. By discussing the nature of how they suppress their memories we can better understand the fundamental differences between these two characters.

Stephen Dedalus agrees with Bergson’s conception of the self as stable and in flux. In “Scylla and Charybdis” Stephen acknowledges that over time his body’s “Molecules all change” (U.156; IX.205) but in “Telamachus” he maintains that he is “another now and yet the same.” (U.10; I.310–11) Stephen enters Ulysses highly aware of the fluid nature of his self and cognizant of the emotional obstacles related to his mother’s death. In “Proteus,” he ruminates while walking on Sandymount Strand, making symbolic connections between his surroundings and his memories. When Stephen contemplates the drowning man, he reminds himself that he “could not save [his mother].” (U.38; III.329–30) When Stephen sees the midwives, he compares them to his mother and himself to the baby they carry (U.32; III.45–54). Except for the end of “Proteus,” there is nothing that escapes Stephen’s vision without being associated with a personal memory. The reader gets the sense that Stephen’s relationship with the past is a narcissistic, obsessive one.

Although Bergson would embrace the active role that the past plays in Stephen’s present consciousness, he would criticize the forced, contemplative nature of Stephen’s recollections. Voluntary memory, the conscious retrieval of past moments, depends on the intellect and seeks photographic images rather than the “sensations” (U.7; I.193) and intuitive reality of lost time (Rickard 1998, 63). Bergson valued the inherent intensity of spontaneous memories, which though is “masked by the acquired recollection, may flash out at intervals; but it disappears at the least movement of the voluntary memory.” (Bergson 1962, 101) The unique challenge is, whereas Odysseus’ return to Ithaca occurs in space with a fixed destination, Stephen’s need to resolve his past is a journey through time. Through voluntary memory, Stephen only summons the content of the past, like the fact that he refused to pray at his mother’s deathbed and the fact that he failed to produce significant work in Paris. He has lost the original emotions associated with those memories, the vivid qualities that make them meaningful. This contrasts with Bloom’s sensual, Proustian recollection of making love to Molly on the Howth (U.144; VIII.897–916). Unlike Stephen, Bloom revels in the sensory, romantic details of the past to the point of being overly nostalgic. Like Stephen’s father who returns to Cork in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Bloom welcomes the meaningful events of his youth that drive his orientation towards life and the future.

To some extent, Stephen is flawed because he is young, and has not had the opportunity to make a collection of powerful memories as Bloom and Simon Dedalus have had. Mainly though, Stephen is inhibited by his predilection for intellectual activity, which allows him to fervently discuss Hamlet in “Scylla and Charybdis” but prevents him from resolving his own sexuality or from talking empathetically with other Dubliners. Stephen’s ruminations prevent him from truly engaging with the world around him and the whole of his past, and therefore the whole of himself that wants to become an artist.

In the opening of Ulysses, the only instance of Stephen’s thought that is untouched by his intellect is the final sentence of “Proteus,” which occurs after he picks “from his nostril on a ledge of rock” (U.42; III.500–501). This uncharacteristic bodily action foreshadows the introduction of Bloom, and a possible solution to Stephen’s problem with voluntary memory: habits. Joyce does not want readers to forget that Ulysses is set only on a single day, and that the machinations of Bloom’s daily routine where he cooks, walks around Dublin, and then returns home is bound to repeat ad infinitum. The novel is merely a cross-section of a Mobius strip that the modern Odysseus must travel along everyday. Thus, Joyce valorizes the mundane, bodily exercises of Bloom who values the sensations that Stephen’s consciousness is devoid of.

Yet, spontaneous memory eludes Bloom as well. In “Lotus-Eaters,” an unpleasant memory of his father’s suicide flashes as Bloom thinks about theatre. He recoils from the unsolicited memory-image, “No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time.” (U.63; V.211) Bloom forcefully suppresses the painful, unresolved parts of his past by steering his attention to a group of horses “with their long noses stuck in nosebags.” (U.63; V.216) Like the horses, Bloom is stuck in a pattern encapsulated by his bodily needs for food, defecation, and sex. For Bergson, Bloom is plagued by the mechanical movements of habit memory, which are created through repetition and are expressed through action rather than representation (Bergson 1962, 91). Habit memory stores in the mechanisms of the body information for practical actions. Therefore, habit is the opposite of the voluntary memory that directs attention to the imagination, but it also alienates people from spontaneous memory by placing attention on the body.

Unlike Stephen, Bloom is able to live fully in the present and to plan for the future. However, because of Bloom’s dependence on habit memory, he lives too much in the present. Bloom, like other Dubliners, spends most of the day meandering around the city, looking for ways to satisfy his animal desires. He is paralyzed by his passive mode of living, only accessing the past in random, short-lived spurts of spontaneous memory or in nostalgic reveries. In Bergson’s philosophy, both Stephen and Bloom have locked up their pasts, the profound impact of which is not revealed until the flooding of memories in “Circe.” Until they can compromise voluntary or habit memory, the protagonists of Ulysses will lack the pure memory achieved by Joyce’s ideal stream of consciousness narration in “Penelope.”

Joyce’s early biographer, Frank Budgen, once said that Joyce “prized memory above all other human faculties.” (Hart 1962, 53) This interest in memory, how it can be represented in art, and how memory can glue a fragmented self into an enduring identity, established Joyce as a major Modernist writer. However, it is not always clear to readers how the stream of consciousness technique in Ulysses truly represents the chaotic assortment of thoughts and memories of our minds. Through an analysis of Bergson’s philosophy we concluded that, with the exception of Molly’s soliloquy, Joyce never intended to represent full, spontaneous memory. Instead, Joyce puts into full force Bergson’s thesis that individuals in modern society are alienated by voluntary and habit memory, by rumination and nostalgia, which distort the meaning and fulfillment that derives from a holistic relationship with the past. This quest for Duration was vital for the society that these men inhabited, whose soldiers died in World War I, whose workers felt deindividualized by industrialization, and whose citizens had lost a sense of self. Without a genuine grasp on memory, people like Stephen and Bloom are doomed to fade away in a society like “The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.” (U.91; VI.872). It is the efforts of thinkers like Bergson and writers like Joyce that these people will survive for an eternity, in the pages of Ulysses.

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Citations

Bergson, Henri. L’Évolution Créatrice (Creative Evolution). Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Modern Library, 1944.

Bergson, Henri. Matière et Mémoire (Matter and Memory). Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962.

Hart, Clive. Structure and Motif in “Finnegans Wake”. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1962.

Hogan, Patrick C. Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, Inc., 1986; orig. ed., 1922.

Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1928.

Perri, Trevor. Henri Bergson. In S. Bernecker & K. Michaelian (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (pp. 510–518). New York: Routledge, 2017.

Rickard, John S. Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Schwarz, Daniel R. Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Schwarz, Daniel R. Reading Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.