Eco-JoyceTHE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION

OF JAMES JOYCE

Edited by

Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin

First published in 2014 byCork University PressYoungline Industrial EstatePouladuff Road, TogherCork, Ireland

© The Contributors 2014

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Introduction:James Joyce and Ecocriticism

ROBERT BRAZEAU and DEREK GLADWIN

This collection brings together fourteen previously unpublishedessays that introduce and examine the overarching ecological

consciousness evinced in the writings of James Joyce. Although Joyceis one of the most critically examined writers in the English language,and easily the most in all of Irish literature, there has never been avolume that focuses on the environmental themes found in his writ-ings. These essays approach Joyce’s ecocritical consciousness from avariety of overlapping and mutually informing perspectives andaddress two broadly conceived but fundamental questions: whyshould Joyce be considered a writer of interest to ecocritics and howdoes investigating the ecological dimension of Joyce’s work con-tribute to both existing Joyce scholarship and ecocritical theory?

Ecocriticism clearly represents a new and important direction inliterary studies, and scholars who are compelled by this criticaloutlook will, we hope, find this collection of interest in the contextof their work. The essays presented here will help to suggest newand profitable pathways for future work in ecocriticism. In addition,scholars working within Irish studies draw on a wide variety of crit-ical outlooks, including cultural studies, post-colonial studies, trans national studies and, of course, modernist studies; this bookwill help that community become better acquainted with how eco-criticism elucidates the work of Irish writers, and will encouragefurther research in this direction. As we show here, even writers likeJoyce, who are usually regarded as primarily urban, exhibit a strongecological dimension in their work, and there are many other Irishwriters who have produced work that directly engages issues inecology and environmental studies.1 Eco-Joyce covers a multitude ofdisciplines in an attempt to serve as a point of entry into Joyce andecocriticism of course, but it will also suggest ways in which Irishstudies and modernist studies could gain energy from this relatively

1

new and vital approach. Before moving into critical analysis ofJoyce’s individual works, however, this introduction briefly outlinesthe ecocritical field for readers of Joyce who are unfamiliar with thiscritical outlook; it then discusses recent advances in ecocriticism andIrish studies, as well as contemporary work in Joyce scholarship;and, finally, it offers a brief overview of the essays in this collectionand how they engage with issues of space, place and environment inJoyce’s fiction and non-fiction.

A Brief Look at Ecocriticism

Once regarded as peripheral to cultural studies, ecocriticism is nowcentral within contemporary scholarship. Ecocritical works havecome to be featured more prominently on course reading lists, con-ferences are devoted to the critical outlook and an increasingnumber of publications appear each year that offer ecocritical read-ings of literary works or cultural and aesthetic objects. Thedefinition of ecocriticism, nevertheless, can be more difficult to sortout than its history, especially since ecocritical investigations canrange from reading texts with an eye towards environmental degra-dation to more expansive approaches taken up in ecofeminism,postcolonial ecocriticism, animal studies, genetic engineering, geog-raphy and travel writing. More recently, biopolitics has emerged as anew, compelling and heavily theorised area that shares much incommon with ecocriticism. Due to the recent proliferation of eco-critical themes in scholarly work, we will briefly contextualiseecocritical theory by cataloguing some of the historical and contem-porary currents in the field.

William Rueckert was the first to introduce the term ‘ecocriticism’in his 1978 article, ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment inEcocriticism’. Rueckert’s goal was to expand the critical discourse ofliterary studies in order to ‘join literature to ecology’.2 By Rueckert’scoinage, the term ‘eco’ connotes environments that are natural, butthe prefix has been reappropriated from the science of ecology and isused synonymously with ‘environmentalism’ or ‘green’.3 Ecocriticism,however, did not fully emerge as a recognised sub-theory of culturalstudies until the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks inLiterary Ecology (1996). This collection brought together historicaland contemporary work that sought to stress the importance of anenvironmental engagement within literary and critical practice. As the

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co-editor of the volume, Cheryll Glotfelty, points out in the intro-duction, ‘Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnectionsbetween nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of lan-guage and literature.’4 Subsequently, ecocriticism has come to focuson literary texts that address both general and specific issues dealingwith the environment, language and culture.

Once a sufficiently elaborate critical lens for engaging with literature, culture and ecology had been established, ecocriticism bur -geoned throughout North America relatively quickly. At about thesame time The Ecocriticism Reader was being assembled for publica-tion, the Association of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) wasformed along with the allied journal Interdisciplinary Studies inLiterature and the Environment (ISLE); ISLE is still considered thedefinitive journal in the field. This ‘first-wave’ movement of ecocriti-cism grew rapidly until only recently, when it came under fire for notchallenging the definition of terms like ‘nature’, ‘ecology’ and‘culture’ within a more rigorous theoretical framework. Thus, theintroduction of a ‘second wave’ of ecocriticism began when GregGarrard published the first pragmatic overview of the movement,Ecocriticism (2004). In many ways, Garrard bridged the first andsecond wave by looking at the ten or so years prior to the publicationof his book even while offering a kind of programme for the future ofecocritical studies. Furthermore, it should be noted that Garrard hassustained a critical rigour in his numerous publications in this field.

The ‘second wave’ of ecocriticism has offered new ideas abouthow this theory can speak to issues beyond the aesthetic and literary.Ecocritical works frequently engage with ethical, practical and polit-ical concerns. This wave of ecocritical thinking, as it reimagined theentire approach, also called into question the assumptions laden intothe familiar terms of the movement and, because of the evolvingnature of green cultural studies, the term ‘ecocriticism’ no longerserves as a sufficient catch-all for the various forms that ecologicallyoriented criticism can take; such work is often now referred to asenvironmental criticism, cultural ecology, ecofiction, literary ecology,ecotheory, or literary environmental studies, depending on the objec-tive and direction of the critic.5 For example, Lawrence Buell isconsidered a prominent figure of both the first and second wave ofecocriticism because his trilogy bridged both eras: The EnvironmentalImagination (1995), Writing for an Endangered World (2001), andThe Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). After reflecting upon

INTRODUCTION 3

the greening of literary studies, he now prefers the term ‘environ-mental criticism’ in order to escape the association that ‘ecocriticism’often has with the first wave. He contends,

Although I believed then and continue to believe that the liter-atures of nature do bear important witness against ‘thearrogance of humanism’ (Ehrenfeld 1978), I found myselfagreeing with those who thought the concentration on ‘envi-ronment’ as ‘nature’ and on nature writing as the mostrepresentative environmental genre were too restrictive, andthat a mature environmental aesthetics – or ethic, or politics –must take into account the interpenetration of metropolis andoutback, of anthropocentric as well as biocentric concerns.6

As Buell suggests, the tension in ecocriticism has arisen around howwe view and define ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’, moving frompredominantly North American nature writing – which is often com-pelled by an epiphanic experience of nature, which was initially hailedas the quintessential environmental literature – to more recentadvancements in literatures examining issues dealing with urbanism,gender, resource management, contested landscapes in colonialzones, Darwinism, environmental justice and issues of space andplace in various geographies. While we are mindful of the value ofBuell’s careful application of the term, we have preferred the use ofthe older term ‘ecocriticism’ in the current volume because we feel itmay be more familiar to readers who are coming to this material froman interest in Joyce studies.

As with many critical schools, these internal debates can forge newterrain for critics in exploring the boundaries and possibilities of theapproach. Fortuitously, debates in ecocriticism have sent many criticsback to Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973) as thetext where culture and nature (in the form of pastoralism) are expli-cated in pragmatic and historical terms. Williams’ work has remainedimportant for ecocritics both because he sketches a history of thedevelopment of a literature of urban and rural consciousness, andalso explicates how both the urban and rural have come to denote anentire structure of affect. Engaging with Williams’ discussion of thehistorical and materialist nature of representations of urban and ruralenvironments and extending the argument in explicitly ecocriticaldirections, Kate Soper’s What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and theNon-Human (1995) suggests that the philosophical concept of‘nature’ does not adequately stand in for the myriad and conflicted

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representations of the external environment. Other critics, such asTimothy Morton, whose Nature Without Ecology: RethinkingEnvironmental Aesthetics (2007) challenges the aestheticisation ofnature, suggest that ecocriticism should employ a more robust theo-retical aptitude and methodology in order to gain a wider audienceand professional legitimisation.

The first and second wave divide in ecocriticism notwithstanding,ecocritics collectively agree that they are generally concerned withhumanity’s mutual deep and abiding connection to the environmentand with developing a critical discourse that speaks of the text’sability to articulate a sense of our shared belonging to the naturalworld. As the subtitle of this collection suggests, we want to be inclu-sive of theories of space, place, culture and embodiment in Joyce’swritings. We believe, along with a rising number of scholars of Irishwriting and ecocritics, that issues surrounding place and subjectivity,urban and rural landscapes, ecological degradation and climatechange, as well as gender, sexuality and embodiment all representpertinent issues in Joyce’s writings. Perhaps above all, then, Eco-Joycelooks at the writings of James Joyce in broad ecocritical terms inorder to include many voices and approaches in this promising direc-tion in Joyce studies.

The Emergence of an Irish Ecocriticism

As with the rest of the Western world, Ireland faces increasingly dif-ficult questions about the environment, and an explicitly Irishecocriticism has emerged as a response to this significant concern.During the era of the Celtic Tiger, urban development, pollutionfrom industrialisation, lax regulations for business and unsustain-able economic growth had a deleterious effect on the environment.These contemporary shortcomings (or worse) mark our era as espe-cially challenged where the environment is concerned and muchhas been written about Ireland’s short-term and long-term chal-lenges in relation to the environment.7 As we will see, Joyce’sDublin also confronted many important environmental issues (suchas air pollution, clean water distribution and waste removal, toname a few) and Joyce was a keen reader of the importance of theseissues in his own time and place. Our view, then, is that engagingwith literary and cultural works that confront environmental issuesis not only pressing, but also long overdue. And while the exilic

INTRODUCTION 5

writer Joyce is simultaneously bound to late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Dublin, he nevertheless demonstrates an abidinginterest in environmental issues that reflect this period of history aswell as contemporary Ireland. As this collection reveals, Irish geog-raphy, especially when it is figured as cultural geography, occupies acentral place in Joyce’s work.

Gerry Smyth was the first scholar to discuss the relevance of eco-criticism to Irish writing. In ‘“Shite and Sheep”: An EcocriticalPerspective on Two Recent Irish Novels’ (2000), Smyth stressedthe relationship between Irish space, geography and environment.A year later in Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, he con-tended that ‘the study of the relationship between culture andenvironment overlaps significantly with the study of Irish culturalhistory, and more specifically with analysis that addresses the issueof Irish space’.8 Since Symth’s publications, a few ecocritical treat-ments of Irish subjects have followed, leading up to threeprominent publications: Tim Wenzell’s Emerald Green: AnEcocritical Study of Irish Literature (2009), Christine Cusick’sedited collection, Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of IrishTexts (2010) and Eamonn Wall’s Writing the Irish West: Ecologiesand Traditions (2011). And while these texts substantiate theimmediate critical need for ecocriticism in Irish studies, they do notinclude Joyce as a figure under consideration. Michael Rubenstein’sroundly (and deservedly) praised Public Works (2010) looks at thecentrality of the sewer system in Ulysses and in so doing helps todemonstrate the importance of an ecological reading of Joyce’swork, although Rubenstein’s own approach is more historicist andmaterialist than ecological in orientation.

In addition to these significant publications, the conference‘Ireland and Ecocriticism: An Interdisciplinary Conference’ was heldat Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in June, 2010,and constituted the first conference devoted exclusively to Irish eco-criticism. The success of this conference and the works referencedabove adequately demonstrate Smyth’s point, ‘Irish studies and eco-criticism will have a lot to say to each other. . . . Geographicalpeculiarity and historical discontinuity have produced a situation inIreland in which questions concerning space, landscape, locality,gender, urban and rural experience and nature have become centralto both the cultural and the critical imagination.’9 Following theemergence of a strong ecocritical dimension in Irish studies, the

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Association for Literature and the Environment-UK added Irelandto the association, which is now called ASLE-UKI.

Even though the development of Irish ecocriticism is relativelyrecent, it should not go without mentioning that its trajectoryfollows the work of many Irish geographers and some literary criticswho have helped to locate culture, nature, rural history and the cityas central to the Irish imagination. That is, there have been manytexts that ecocritics can turn to in order to add to the emerging androbust ecocritical discussion in Ireland. One particularly relevantexample is John Wilson Foster’s comprehensive volume, Nature inIreland: A Scientific and Cultural History (1997). As ecocriticismwas taking shape in North America, Foster was anthologising thework of writers who were exploring the historical and contemporarymeaning of ‘nature’ in the context of Irish intellectual and culturalproduction. This massive undertaking clearly demonstrates anabiding interest in the subject of sustained reflection on the naturalworld among Irish writers, and even while Foster does not offer hisvolume under the rubric of ecotheory, it is clearly animated by thesame kinds of interests, concerns and ethical thinking that suffusescontemporary ecocriticism. Foster, it should be noted, was preoccu-pied with the century-old gap between science and culture in Ireland,and argues in the preface for a return of Irish natural history that isinclusive of culture. According to Foster, debate regarding threeimportant cultural issues should surface as a result of bridging thisgap: environmentalism, animal rights, and genetic engineering.10 Inshort, Foster, though predominantly a literary critic and withoutarticulating a self-consciously ecocritical stance, nevertheless suc-ceeded in formulating at least one potentially prosperous approachto a decidedly Irish ecocriticism.11

Many geographers have focused their work on environmentalconcerns within the Irish landscape. Patrick J. Duffy’s Exploring theHistory and Heritage of Irish Landscapes (2007) identifies the cul-tural, historical, ecological, literary and social relationships that haveformed in any discipline discussing both the built and natural envi-ronments in Ireland. Brian Graham’s collection, In Search of Ireland:A Cultural Geography (1997), investigates issues of gender, post-colonialism and land management within Irish cultural geography.The historical geographer, Kevin Whelan, has, throughout his prolificcareer, focused on the relationship between space and cultural andcommunal memory, and has therefore contributed inestimably to a

INTRODUCTION 7

body of work that is decidedly ecocritical in orientation if not inname. Moreover, Irish geographers have identified environmental,cultural and historical problems within the culture of tourism, anindustry that has become central to the Irish economy. In the co-edited volume, Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis (1993),Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin address spatial, geographical,cultural and environmental issues within Irish tourism that also speakbroadly to ecotheory. For instance, travel writing and photography,rural imagery and heritage centres in Ireland are surprisingly ripe forecocritical investigation. In fact, many of the representations ofIreland that inhere in contemporary tourist documents derive fromthe Literary Revival and its aesthetic inflation of rural Ireland.Contemporary Irish geography has become infused with an ecocrit-ical dimension even though the practitioners in the field do nottypically define themselves with this term.

The Future of Eco-Joyce

There has yet to be any sustained attention given to James Joyce’srelationship to ecocriticism. There have been some appeals, however,toward a greening of Joyce criticism among Joyceans. Alongside ahandful of presenters at various Joyce conferences in the last severalyears, Michelle McSwiggan Kelly’s essay, ‘Oceanic Longing: AnEcocritical Approach to Joyce’, came out in Joyce in Progress:Proceedings of the 2008 James Joyce Graduate Conference in Rome(2008). In addition to Kelly, Margarita Estévez Saá and MarisolMorales Ladrón both have chapters on ecocritical approaches toJoyce in the edited volume, New Perspective on James Joyce (2010).12

Furthermore, Seán Latham recently emphasised that the ‘lack ofattention Joyce scholars in general have paid to the vibrant field ofecocriticism’ needs to increase with ‘an awareness of ecology and acritical attentiveness to Joyce’s own theory of nature’ as the growingtrend in ecocriticism takes shape in modernism and Irish studies.13 Asthis volume demonstrates, there are many ecocritical points of entryto Joyce’s work, and ecocriticism is amenable to some of the morepopular rubrics, including modernism, studies in empire/colo-nialism, feminism, nationalism and urbanism, through which Joyce’swork is more typically examined.

Two distinct schools of thought have come to dominate Joycestudies: the view that Joyce is a high modernist, or an historically and

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politically engaged Irish writer. These two labels are not exclusive ofeach other and in many ways are complementary. Nonetheless, theycan be determinative of how one critically engages with Joyce’soeuvre. Questions of landscape, nature, colonialism and geographicalidentity arise in discussions of Irish nationalism and Catholicism, onthe one hand and, on the other hand, questions of narrative, lan-guage, aesthetics and the city arise in connection to Joyce’sengagement with literary and cultural modernity. These two perspec-tives – Joyce the universal writer of the modern era or Joyce thenationalist – permeate the scholarship. This collection does not pre-scribe to one reading over another; however, the essays in Eco-Joyceconcentrate on Joyce’s interest with a variety of compelling linguisticand literal environments, and as such collectively work to bridge thefalse dichotomy that is still evident in Joyce scholarship.

Recently, ecocritics have begun to investigate issues like empire,modernism and gender as part of the greater pantheon of ecologicalinquiry. Alfred Crosby began the discussion of the ecology of empirein his seminal Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion ofEurope, 900–1900 (1986), arguing that imperialism, both biologicaland political, alters the local ecology of place through biologicalemigration and invasion. Edward Said also reminds us, ‘If there isanything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperi-alism, it is the primacy of the geographical element.’14 Crosby’sbook predates much of the ecocritical expansion in the 1990s, butmore recent works have analysed imperial expansion as an impor-tant, even decisive, environmental event. Both Graham Huggan’sand Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,Environment (2010) and Laura Wright’s ‘Wilderness into CivilizedShapes’: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (2010) are primeexamples. Although the evidence for Joyce’s own interest in colonialand anti-imperial Ireland is vast and has been explicated in contem-porary scholarship, the connection between Joyce and postcolonialecocriticism has not.

For all of its focus on urban cityscapes, alienation and psycholog-ical and philosophical contingency, modernity itself has to be seen asushering in a new conception of the natural world and our relation-ship to it. Usually regarded as antipathetic to nature and asprecipitating contemporary environmental degradation, modernityand the assumptions that underwrite its megamyths (scientificprogress, social order and personal liberation), all require that nature

INTRODUCTION 9

become subordinate to some other perceived ethical, social or com-mercial imperative. Accordingly, many critics have begun to explorethe ways in which modernist writers documented and critiqued theemergence of modern urban and suburban development. Importantmodernists like Joseph Conrad, Virginia Wolfe and D.H. Lawrencehave become significant figures within an ecologically engaged‘greening’ of modernism, owing to the attention to forests, riversand rural landscapes that suffuse their work. This reconsideration ofliterary modernism as engaged with the dichotomous relationshipbetween built environments and the natural world is obviously sig-nificant and compelling, and as this collection shows, Joyce was akeen reader of modernity as an ecological event.

However, Joyce was also clearly interested in Irish modernism ascontaining a distinctive historical trajectory, one that emphasisesnationalist symbols of agrarian landscapes and Yeatsian metaphors foran anti-modern, anti-imperial, and mythologically-oriented Ireland.Admittedly, Joyce took issue with the Literary Revival’s atavistic rep-resentations of Ireland, but it is also undeniable that he toorecognised and, at times, championed Irish modernism as an alter-nate form of literary modernism and philosophical modernity.Indeed, collectively these essays point up the salutary manner inwhich Irish modernism is underwritten by a consciousness of regionand centre (or rural and urban) and that Joyce located this distinctionas primary in his explication of the consciousness of modern Ireland.

While reading Joyce’s ecocritical imagination alongside hisinterest in modernity and the history of imperialism helps to focuscritical attention on previously under-considered aspects of hiswriting, the somewhat more established view that Joyce’s workspeaks to the modern relationship between the genders is also amplyevidenced in the present volume. Ecofeminism – considered by somecritics to be part of the third wave of feminism15 – treats two signifi-cant historical events as almost synonymous; in this work, a history ofenvironmental manipulation and exploitation is regarded as con-gruent with the essentialisation, subjugation and oppression ofwomen. However, some feminists suggest that the tension between‘eco’ and ‘feminism’ contributes to re-essentialising women as syn-onymous with ‘nature’, thereby nullifying female agency andautonomy and reinscribing prescriptive gender norms. One suchecofeminist reading could be made of Joyce’s Molly Bloom as anoversimplified embodiment of the earth mother with concomitant

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goddess associations related to Celtic mythology.16 Ecofeminismunderscores that issues of discursive readings of nature and gendercan be explored and articulated in increasingly expansive readings oftexts. A number of essays in this volume take up the ways in whichJoyce’s reading of gender is central to a consideration of his engage-ment with ecological realities.

It seems, then, that for the many reasons outlined here and forothers that will only be explicated by others, Joyce studies and eco-criticism are mutually informing and of relevance to contemporaryscholarship. We cannot enumerate all of the possible theoreticalmatrices among ecocritical readings of Joyce in this introduction, butjust as Derek Attridge points out that ‘The number of entrances tothe Joycean mansion . . . is potentially infinite,’17 our edited collec-tion serves to punctuate this already compelling and growing body ofcollective and imaginative work by bringing together fourteen previ-ously unpublished essays by pre-eminent Joyceans, scholars of Irishliterature and ecocritics, in its examination of the overarching eco-logical consciousness evinced in James Joyce’s fiction andnon-fiction. Eco-Joyce is thematically arranged into three sections: I.Nature and Environmental Consciousness in Joyce’s Fiction; II.Joyce and the Urban Environment; and III. Joyce, Somatic Ecologyand the Body. To enable a varied readership, each section allows boththe broad/concise and supportive/sceptical critic to engage withJoyce and ecocriticism. The essays in this volume address many of thechallenges, contexts and dimensions that emerge when we readJoyce’s writings with an ecological sensibility.

The essays presented in the first section, ‘Nature and Environ -mental Consciousness in Joyce’s Fiction’, investigate Joyce’s generalapproach to the subjects ‘nature’ and ‘environmental’. These essayscollectively work to describe the ample purview for an ecologicalreading of Joyce’s fiction. Fiona Becket’s essay examines the relation-ship between high literary modernism in the writing of Joyce and acontemporary understanding of eco-poetics. It is a discussion thatfocuses on aspects of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake but draws on exam-ples of mid-century writing including J.G. Ballard’s The DrownedWorld and The Drought. In Ballard, as represented by these novels ofthe 1960s in which the ‘real’ returns in a Žižekian sense, there is infact little that can be theorised and understood beyond the self,beyond subjectivities. Becket’s essay considers the legacy of Joyceanself-representation in relation to this mode of writing, which invokes

INTRODUCTION 11

the environment in order to disavow it and to invite a critical con-centration on Joycean ‘place’. The point is not only to subject theJoycean texts to a ‘reading’, but more significantly to invite thesetexts, which are brought to bear on Ballard’s work, to contribute tothe development of an eco-poesis, and in doing so to contribute todebates about the future of ecocriticism.

Cheryl Herr’s essay similarly points to ways in which contempo-rary ecocritics may formulate their responses not only to Joyce’swork, but to literary texts more broadly. Indeed, Herr’s essaycompels a new space for ecocritical attention on the level of syntaxrather than strictly reading the verisimilitude of literary works formarkers of positive or negative ecocritical attention. Herr argues thatscatological themes in Joyce have often been addressed from a psy-choanalytic perspective, especially when Joyce’s 1904 letters to Noraare taken into account. Rather than concentrate on the writer’sputative anal fixation or simply chronicle the scattered references toexcrement that punctuate his works, this paper looks at the prob-lems of human waste disposal in Ireland during the lifetime of JamesJoyce and his parents. Building on the argument in MichaelRubenstein’s brilliant book Public Works (2010), which concludesthat Ulysses is Joyce’s mature reflection on modernisation and sani-tation in Dublin, particularly in reference to the waterworks,electrification and sewage disposal, Herr’s paper argues thatFinnegans Wake in fact marks a new stage in Joyce’s address to thelong-standing and persistent problem of waste disposal. Joyce specif-ically addresses the task of sanitisation at the sentence level; in theWake sentences periodically feed on culture, fatten and assume whatwe might call peristaltic faecal shapes.

Bonnie Kime Scott’s chapter, ‘Joyce, Ecofeminism and the Riveras Woman’, embarks from the view that despite all the due attentionthat has gone to modernity, technology, consumerism and ‘making itnew’ in modernist studies, the category of ‘nature’ has a persistent, iflittle recognised, presence in the works of many modernists,including James Joyce and other Irish writers. The Irish male literaryestablishment has also tended to equate their nation with woman,which as Eavan Boland has noted, is problematic for a woman writer.Taking an ecofeminist approach, Scott considers Joyce’s genderingof nature, and particularly the River Liffey, as feminine. Finally, shecompares Boland’s poem, ‘Anna Liffey’, to Joyce’s ALP coda inFinnegans Wake, finding a comparable grappling with history and

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dissolution in both authors, but a more personally grounded genderidentification with the river in Boland’s work.

Erin Walsh’s ‘Word and World: The Ecology of the Pun inFinnegans Wake’ also examines Joyce’s engagement with Irishhistory in the Wake, but Walsh moves from city to nation in herexploration of how the Wake’s variable puns suggest a model for anecological discourse of nation – nation not only in process, but asprocess – that supplants the fiction of nation as unitary organic wholewith the self-adulterating word-world of the Wake. Walsh con tendsthat by destabilising the conceptual and linguistic boundaries of theword ‘nation’, the Wake articulates nation not as romantic metaphorbut as ecological pun. In the Wake’s final pages, ALP, appearing asboth tree and river, sheds her leaves as the reader’s hand turns thefinal material leaves of the book, further entailing the reader in amaterial-symbolic discourse that models an ecological negotiation ofnational boundaries. Walsh suggests that the reader’s return to the be gin ning of the Wake’s ‘riverrun’ emerges as a suturing that res -tores rather than effaces the in medias res of the text’s opening,producing not a totalising self-contained whole, but a readerlybridge that still honours the rift.

Yi-Peng Lai concludes this section by outlining Joyce’s connec-tion to Ireland’s history of deforestation in ‘The Tree Wedding andthe (Eco)Politics of Irish Forestry in “Cyclops”: History, Language,and the Viconian Politics of the Forest’. Focusing on the TreeWedding scene in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, Lai’s essay delvesinto the problematics of deforestation and Irish politics, and pondersthe question of history in relation to environmental consciousnessand cultural nationalist propaganda in Ireland at the turn of thetwentieth century. She examines the wedding procession of ‘thechevalier John Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the IrishNational Forests, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley’,18 and pro-poses a critical discussion of the intertextual technique of the chapterand the politics surrounding environmental issues during Joyce’stime, as revealed by this specific tree wedding passage. In particular,Lai examines the catalogue’s specific location within the text aproposGiambattista Vico, referencing Viconian historiography regardingthe myth of Vulcan and Cyclops. Also, Lai’s essay reconsiders Joyce’sCyclopean catalogue as a sustained reflection on commerce, colo-nial/capitalist exploitation, the Celtic Revival (especially its languagepolitics) and the deforestation of Ireland.

INTRODUCTION 13

The second section of the volume focuses on ‘Joyce and theUrban Environment’. Margot Norris begins by arguing that theurban setting of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses posessevere challenges to ecocriticism precisely because the city alreadyconstitutes a ‘paved civilisation’, as Irish ecocritic Tim Wenzell callsit. Indeed, a number of images cited or alluded to in the text point toecological disaster: the 1904 General Slocum riverboat catastrophe,for example, and the malnutrition of the Dedalus girls with itsgesture toward Ireland’s ‘Great Hunger’. But in general, Norrismaintains, the ruination of nature is less directly represented in theepisode than obliquely expressed through a series of anti-ecocriticalworld views produced by narrative and character in the text. Theextrusion of nature from the perspectives of the narrative voices andthe Dubliners in ‘Wandering Rocks’ threatens its perceptual extinc-tion in ways that constitute an ecological casualty of a discursive kind.

In ‘Joyce Beyond the Pale’, Brandon Kershner asserts that Joyce’swork has seldom been addressed from an ecological perspectivebecause he is an overwhelmingly urban writer. But on closer exami-nation, his portrayals of the city are closely bounded by a vaguelyconceived and rather brutal vision of nature, a vision clearest in ‘APainful Case’ and ‘The Dead’. According to Kershner, in PortraitJoyce struggles with the Yeatsian, ideologically charged idea of anature associated closely with Irish racial purity and with spirituality,an idea Joyce rejects. Ulysses, whose action does not leave the city,invokes as its most powerful vision of nature Molly and Bloom’smemory of Howth Head, Molly’s memories of Gibraltar, and thescenes on Sandymount Strand, like scenes of the park, all liminalspaces mediating between the city and what lies beyond.

Greg Winston’s essay on the ‘“Aquacities of Thought and Lan -guage”: The Political Ecology of Water in Ulysses’ investigates howecocriticism has tended to neglect the topic of water resources and tolook past urban, modernist texts it deemed unconducive or irrelevantto environmental readings. Winston proposes to fill both of thesecritical gaps by reconsidering Joyce’s allusion in ‘Ithaca’ to theDublin water system (also known as the Vartry Scheme), particularlyfor how it demonstrates the social inequalities that underlay the tech-nological marvel of that massive public-works project. Bloom’sthoughtful digression on his household water supply flows directlyfrom an account of civil engineering to a revealing reference to a1904 legal dispute over water use by the Dublin poor. Doing so, it

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raises questions about political control of water, including whetherthe resource should be treated as a market commodity or universalright. In this regard, Joyce’s novel can be read as articulating a dis-course of political ecology that is concerned with how the powerrelationships in a human community can be both cause and conse-quence of that community’s relation to its environment andexploitation of its resources. A century later, as water moves increas-ingly to the centre of regional and global political conflicts, Ulyssesoffers us a valuable framework and localised example by which tocontemplate issues of water regulation and accessibility.

In ‘“Clacking Along the Concrete Pavement”: Economic Iso -lation and the Bricolage of Place in James Joyce’s Dubliners’,Christine Cusick invokes the theoretical compass of social ecology tostudy humans’ economic relationship with the built environment as achannel for processes of self-actualisation. Offering a close reading ofJoyce’s characters of Eveline and Little Chandler, she asserts that thedesire to escape the built environment of Dublin life is ultimatelythwarted by actual and perceived want of economic agency.Attention to this materiality of place presents a new lens throughwhich to interpret Joyce’s implication of modernity, a lens that dif-fuses emphasis on the alienated individual and gives voice to thereciprocal relationship between the situated human life and its mate-rial and social environments. Through this reading, Cusick examineswhat Joyce might teach critics about the praxis of urban ecocriticism,arguing that the epistemology of Joyce’s Dublin offers critics a modelof how to study human nature’s psychological and physical embodi-ment of urban space.

Derek Gladwin takes us out of Joyce’s Dublin and into theurban/rural divide of the Irish West by examining two of Joyce’snonfiction essays, ‘The City of the Tribes: Italian Echoes in an IrishPort’ and ‘The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England’s SafetyValve in Case of War’, published in the Italian-language newspaper,Il Piccolo della Sera. Although many would consider these articlesJoyce’s pragmatic foray into journalism, Gladwin suggests thatJoyce goes beyond this, functioning as a travel writer in order toprobe the deeper historical and cultural geographies within his Irishitinerary by using a spatial practice called place-attachment,accessing place through personal and cultural experience in thelandscape. Joyce explores the region’s underlying cultural and envi-ronmental currents, at times controversial and conflicted, revealing

INTRODUCTION 15

his deeper emerging interest in the land’s geography. To this end,Gladwin argues that Joyce’s environmental impulse lies within thefabric of the cultural representation of place.

In the final section of Eco-Joyce, ‘Joyce, Somatic Ecology and theBody’, writers look at the centrality of embodiment, sexuality and cor-poreality in Joyce’s textual ecology. Eugene O’Brien argues that art,and specifically that of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, offersa corrective to the Cartesian dualism of mind and body that has beena pervasive influence on not only aesthetics and philosophy, but alsoon the subject and object, and pits humans against the environment.Joyce’s aesthetic theory, which is worked out through Portrait, is aholistic one that values all aspects of experience as part of the aesthetic.O’Brien also underscores the homologies between Joyce’s thinkingon art and that of a number of philosophers and thinkers, such asMartin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. The poli-tics of such a view has strong implications for a criticism that sees theworld not as an object to be used and mastered, as in many discourses,disregarding the importance of environmental legitimacy, but ratheras a partner in aesthetic apprehension and experience.

Robert Brazeau takes up issues of embodiment and wayfindingin his essay, ‘Environment and Embodiment in Joyce’s “TheDead”’. This chapter examines Joyce’s engagement with all of thebehaviours (including eating, drinking, wayfinding and reproduc-tion) that come to reveal the animality and connection withnonhuman nature of his human subjects, especially GabrielConroy, in ‘The Dead’. Brazeau argues that, in this story andothers in Dubliners, Joyce reveals a strong ecological consciousnessthrough his sustained attention to how humans draw on instinc-tual and somatic clues to orient themselves – physically andpsychologically; alone and with others – in their world.

In ‘“Sunflawered” Humanity in Finnegans Wake: Nature, Exis -ten tial Shame and Transcendence’, James Fairhall takes aphenomenological and ecocritical approach to Finnegans Wake.Fairhall indicates that the Wake reflects Joyce’s long-standinginterest in nature and the body, particularly in the duality ofhuman beings as uniquely self-conscious products of evolutionwhose spirit-like minds, seeking transcendence, are tragicomicallytethered to animal-like bodies. As they morph into each other andinto nonhuman entities, the Wake’s characters remain embeddedin a web of natural relationships.

16 ECO-JOYCE

Garry Leonard’s essay concludes this section and the collection asa whole with an expansive and theoretically compelling approach tothe relationship between the body and nature. Leonard argues thatnature seems to manifest itself in Joyce the way a ‘correction’ altersthe stock market. It comes from an unimagined ‘nowhere’ thatclearly becomes a ‘somewhere’ as its presence takes irrevocable effecton what now is, in a way that can no longer be ignored, a false con-struction that has always kept the person ‘elsewhere’. In this essay, hecompares Stephen Dedalus as he experiences two ‘corrections’ fromthe natural environment. The first, from his so-called ‘bird girl’ epiph any in Portrait, is a corrective that ecstatically banishes allnagging thoughts of perhaps entering the priesthood, stirring himinstead to announce his vocation as an artist, ‘a priest of the eternalimagination’. The second correction, also on a beach (SandymountStrand), occurs in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, after Stephen hascrash-landed, yet again, in true Icarian fashion, from his over-hypedflight ‘to forge in the smithy of [his own] soul the uncreated con-science of his race’. Ultimately, Leonard suggests that Joyce is ‘green’in a profoundly radical way: nature is what your body smashes upagainst if you persist long enough in self-serving, self-delusion.

To conclude, Eco-Joyce offers work from a number of establishedJoyceans, as well as incisive critics of ecocriticism, Irish studies, modernism, and contemporary theory. This expansive and inter -disciplinary collection prompts readers of Joyce to address pressingissues around the environment as we move on in the twenty-firstcentury while also contextualising Joyce’s writings as relevant in thisdiscussion. It is our sincere wish that this collection will promptreaders to re-examine Joyce as a writer engaged in a wider ambit ofthemes than has been previously imagined, and that this work willcontribute to the ongoing and fruitful dialogue between Joyceansand environmental critics.

INTRODUCTION 17

FOREWORD (FOGARTY)1 ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Ed.

Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 50–2.2 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: The Hogarth Press,

1985).3 On second-wave ecocriticism, see Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environ mental

Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: BlackwellPublishing, 2005), pp. 17–28 and for an overview of current critiques ofpastoralism and arguments for a post-equilibrium ecology, see Greg Garrard,Ecocriticism. Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 36–92.

4 Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking EnvironmentalAesthetics (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 1–28.

5 ‘Tilly’, Poems and Exiles. Ed. J.C.C. Mays (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 42.6 On the function of animal motifs in Ulysses, see Maud Ellmann, “Ulysses:

Changing into an Animal”, Field Day Review, ed. Seamus Deane and BreandánMacSuibhne 2 (2008): 75–110.

7 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. John Paul Riquelme (New York:Norton), p. 5.

8 ‘Calypso’, Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and ClausMelchior (London: Bodley Head, 1986), pp. 45–57.

9 See J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 33.10 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp. 149–50. 11 “Nausicaa”, Ulysses, pp. 284–313.12 Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 593–628.13 Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and the Modern

Uses of Nature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).

INTRODUCTION (BRAZEAU AND GLADWIN)1 Seamus Heaney, Eamonn Wall, Maeve McGuckian, and Patrick Kavanagh, all

suggest themselves immediately, but the list is much, much longer. In thisvolume, Bonnie Kime Scott looks at Joyce and Eavan Boland together.

2 William Rueckert, ‘Literature and Ecology’, in Cheryl Glotfelty and HaroldFromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens,Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 121.

3 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis andLiterary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 12–13.

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Notes and References

4 Cheryll Glotfelty, ‘Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of EnvironmentalCrisis’, in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.) The Ecocriticism Reader:Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press,1996), p. xix.

5 Contributors to this collection will be using some of these terms interchange-ably. Because ecocrtitical theory has expanded so rapidly in the last twentyyears, it is would be impossible to outline the theory here in greater depth. Werely mainly on the use of ecocriticism because it is still the most widely recog-nised term. For more on recent trends and subsequent texts in ecocriticism seeLawrence Buell, Stacy Alaimo, Greg Garrard and Timothy Morton, as well asgoing to ASLE’s website at www.asle.org.

6 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, pp. 22–23.7 See Liam Leonard, The Environmental Movement in Ireland (New York:

Springer, 2008), pp. 45–49, and Mark Boyle, ‘Cleaning Up After the CelticTiger: Scalar ‘fixes’ in the Political Ecology of Tiger Economies’, Transactions ofthe Institute of British Geographers 27:2 (2002), pp. 172–194, as well as thewritings of the Irish environmentalist Michael Viney.

8 Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (London: Palgrave,2001), p. 10.

9 Smyth, ‘Shite and Sheep: An Ecocritical Perspective on Two Recent IrishNovels’, in ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction’, special issue, Irish University Review30: 1 (2000), p. 164.

10 John Wilson Foster, ‘Preface’, in John Wilson Foster (ed.) Nature in Ireland: AScientific and Cultural History (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press,1997), p. xi.

11 It is also important to note that Foster was the keynote speaker at the ‘Irelandand Ecocriticism: An Interdisciplinary Conference’ in June 2010, where heexamined the tensions and successes in defining and subsequently constructingan Irish ecocriticism in his presentation, ‘The Challenges to an IrishEcocriticism’.

12 See Marisol Morales Ladrón, ‘James Joyce’s Early Writings and EcocriticalTheory: A New Turn?’, pp. 197–210 and Margarita Estévez Saá, ‘Could WeSpeak About an Eco-Feminist Joyce? in Universidad de Deusto (ed.) NewPerspective on James Joyce (La Rioja: Dialnet, 2010), pp. 211–224.

13 Sean Latham, ‘Twenty-first-century Critical Contexts’, in John McCourt (ed.),James Joyce in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 156.

14 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 225. 15 Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 111.16 Bonnie Kime Scott, James Joyce (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1987), p. xiv.17 Derek Attridge, ‘Reading Joyce’, in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce,

ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 28.18 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 1267–69.

JAMES JOYCE, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE THREAT TO OUR ‘NATURALSUBSTANCE’ (BECKET)1 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Žižek: the lecture’, University of Leeds, 18 March 2008. 2 Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1995), pp. 110–11. 3 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (St Albans: Triad/Panther

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