Rhythmic and distant depths in James Joyce and Colm Tóibín

ABSTRACT

This article argues for an essential shift in the phenomenology of architectural representation and experience occurring between the nationally conversant fictions of James Joyce and Colm Tóibín. I examine the architectural figure of the threshold, demonstrating how their fiction proposes contrasting phenomenological engagements with the material and constructed environment. I focus on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to describe Joyce’s rhythmic thresholds as organising, unified, and repetitive punctuations within his architectural schema associated with the eternally recurring unidentified haunting figure. Joyce’s embodied immanent perspective contrasts with Tóibín’s comprehension of depths from a distant perspective. In his short fiction, Tóibín enacts what Jill Stoner calls a minor architecture, resisting structural power through the bodily refusal of architectural participation. This essay highlights a significant cultural contrast in literary aesthetics which indicates profound differences in the aestheticisation of perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• phenomenology
• James Joyce
• Colm Tóibín

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 269.

2. Ibid., lxx.

3. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 266–67.

4. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 198.

5. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 123.

6. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 276.

7. Le Corbusier, 193.

8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 266.

9. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 56.

10. Tóibín, “The Pearl fishers,” 97–98.

11. This study evokes many questions about narrative technique and the act of reading phenomenologically; for example, does detailed description necessarily allow the reader greater perception of the narrative world? Undertaking a speculative phenomenology of reading, Peter Mendelsund writes in What We See When We Read, “Specificity and context add to the meaning and perhaps to the expressiveness of an image, but do not seem to add to the vividness of my experience of an image…the author’s observation and transcription of the world, does not help me to see” (135). Tóibín’s passage exemplifies this point. Though he writes descriptively from a first-person perspective and identifies specific items in Father Moorhouse’s room, his abstract and diegetic style seem to avoid the “vividness” which Mendelsund asserts is part of seeing while reading. Tóibín employs this distant narration of land and buildings throughout his fiction, notably in “The Name of the Game”: “She dreamed of Dublin, the long roads with trees on the sides and house after house almost hidden….where no one would know anything about her, where she and Gerard and the girls would be just people in a house” (97–8).

12. Many post-Joyce twentieth century Irish novelists could be included in this architectural study for their noteworthy structural configurations and phenomenologies of space. Samuel Beckett, Iris Murdoch, and John Banville each suggest cultural shifts in thinking about the intersection between national space and ideology; for example, Beckett applies a postmodern spatial orientation in the form of dislocation and fluidity in his trilogy relevant that is relevant to Deleuze’s notion of deterritorialisation.

13. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 205.

14. Ibid., 206.

15. Ibid., 214.

16. Ibid., 212.

17. Weaver, Joyce’s Music and Noise, 4.

18. Knowles, Bronze by Gold, xxx; xxxv. See Jack Weaver’s Joyce’s Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in His Writings. For a comprehensive review of related criticism, see R. Brandon Kershner’s “Joyce, Music, and Popular Music” in A Companion to James Joyce.

19. Dufrenne, Phenomenon of Aesthetic Experience, 278.

20. Ibid., 280.

21. Ibid., 279–80.

22. Merleau-Ponty, “Art and the World,” 70–72.

23. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 17.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 22.

26. Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture, 128–29.

27. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 55.

28. Joyce, Dubliners, 18.

29. See Benjamin Boysen’s “On the Spectral Presence of the Predecessor in James Joyce – With Special Reference to William Shakespeare” and Luke Gibbons’ Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory.

30. Thurston, Literary Ghosts, 128.

31. Ibid., 144.

32. Eagleton, “Mothering.”

33. O’Shea, “From Joyce to Tóibín,” 111.

34. Ibid., 110.

35. Scholarship continues to be written on postmodern space and place as dystopian, disorienting, and fantastical literature. David Spurr identifies the postmodern novel with what he calls “junkspace” and “disaffection” in the fictive architectures of Thomas Pynchon and J.G. Ballard. Patricia García defines the postmodern and contemporary novel according to the dislocation of the body, the obscurity, erasure, and reversibility of the internal and external, the plurality of space, and boundaries as “liquid constructions.” The aforementioned scholarship is significantly informed and influenced by general cultural theory on the experience of postmodern space and architecture.

36. Jameson, Postmodernism, 11.We see the waning of affect in Tóibín’s contemporary fiction and its relationship with his spatiality. The following is an excerpt from Tóibín’s “The Use of Reason,” based on the Dublin art thief Martin Cahill:The city was a great emptiness. He looked out from the balcony of one of the top flats on Charlemont Street. The wide waste ground below him was empty. He closed his eyes and thought about the other flats on this floor, most of them empty now in the afternoon, just as the little bare bathrooms were empty and the open stairwells were empty. He imagined the houses on the long stretches of suburb going out from the city…He thought about the confidence of those roads, their strength and their solidity, and then he allowed his mind to wander into the rooms of suburban houses, bedrooms empty all day, the downstairs rooms empty all night, the long back gardens, neat, trimmed, empty too for all of the winter and most of the summer. The sad attics empty as well. Defenseless. No one would notice an intruder scaling a wall, flitting across a garden to scale the next wall, a nondescript man checking the back of the house for a sign of life, for alarm systems or a guard dog, and then silently prizing a window open, sliding in, carefully crossing a room, watching for an easy exit. He would open a door without making a sound, so alert as to be almost invisible. (1–2)Tóibín’s use of emptiness, throughout the entire collection of The Empty Family and in this passage, is comparable to what we might call Hemingway’s “Nada” effect. Just as Hemingway overtly and compulsively refers to the rain covering the empty Spanish square in “Cat in the Rain,” Tóibín fills his reader with the existential vastness, ubiquity, and the inescapability of nothingness. Arguably, Ernest Hemingway’s postmodern aesthetics and his influence on Tóibín’s work, as identified by the author himself, contributes to Tóibín’s ambiguous structure of feeling. In an interview with The Guardian, Tóibín expresses how reading Hemingway as a young man gave him an “idea of prose as something smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences.” Here Tóibín’s recognises the textual and signified distancing particular to Hemingway, which would affect his own construction of fictive space.

37. Tóibín, “The Use of Reason,” 19.

38. Ryan, “Abstract Homes: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization,” 24.

39. Tóibín, “The Pearl Fishers,” 94.

40. Ibid., 117.

41. Special attention has been given to sexualised space and oceanic environments in Tóibín’s “Three Friends,” The Blackwater Lightship, and Nora Webster. See Liam Harte’s “‘The Endless Mutation of the Shore’: Colm Tóibín’s Marine Imaginary”; Robinson Murphy’s “The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín’s ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’”; Nancy Easterlin’s “Place-in-Process in Colm Toíbín’s The Blackwater Lightship: Emotion, Self-Identity, and the Environment.”

42. Tóibín, “The Pearl Fishers,” 112.

43. This story generally conveys Tóibín’s larger aesthetic and thematic mode of inhabiting other bodies, as well as vacating from one’s own body. Both The Master and The Testament of Mary are examples of the author’s tendency to inhabit a life or character. The Empty Family is an example of evacuating bodies. The narrator of “Sleep” somehow connects with his brother’s body at the hour of his brother’s death and later while being hypnotised experiences death through his brother’s body. Sexual and romantic encounters and contact are the experiences in Tóibín’s fiction that become more embodied, which is also true in “Sleep.” The body of the narrator’s lover and their bodies in relation is communicated, but his connection with spaces he actually occupies remains vague. The mirror image of the distant present space is that he imagines in detail spaces he has never occupied.

44. Tóibín, “Sleep.”

45. See note 1 above.

46. Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture, 7.

47. Ryan, “Abstract Homes: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization”, 26.

48. Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture, 68.

49. Tóibín, “The Pearl Fishers,” 118.

50. MP, Eye and Mind, 123.

51. Joyce, Dubliners, 20.

52. Tóibín, “The Use of Reason,” 38–9.