Urban Planning, Irish Modernism, and Dublin

Notes 1 Urbanizing the Revival: Urban Planning, Irish Modernism, and Dublin 1. Arguably Andrew Thacker betrays a similar underlying assumption when he writes of ‘After the Race’: ‘Despite the characterisation of Doyle as a rather shallow enthusiast for motoring, the excitement of the car’s “rapid motion through space” is clearly associated by Joyce with a European modernity to which he, as a writer, aspired’ (Thacker 115). 2. Wirth-Nesher’s understanding of the city, here, is influenced by that of Georg Simmel, whereby the city, while divesting individuals of a sense of communal belonging, also affords them a degree of personal freedom that is impossible in a smaller community (Wirth-Nesher 163). Due to the lack of anonymity in Joyce’s Dublin, an indicator of its pre-urban or non-urban status, this personal freedom is unavailable to Joyce’s characters. ‘There are almost no strangers’ in Dubliners, she writes, with the exceptions of those in ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Araby’ (164). She then enumerates no less than seven strangers in the collection, arguing however that they are ‘invented through the transformation of the familiar into the strange’ (164). 3. Wirth-Nesher’s assumptions about Dublin’s status as a city are not really necessary to the focus of her analysis, which emphasizes the importance Joyce’s early work places on the ‘indeterminacy of the public and private’ and its effects on the social lives of the characters (166). That she chooses to frame this analysis in terms of Dublin’s ‘exacting the price of city life and in turn offering the constraints of a small town’ (173) reveals forcefully the pervasiveness of this type of reading of Joyce’s Dublin. 4. See, for example, Mathews, Kincaid, Rubenstein, and Strachan and Nally. 5. This covered the period 1853–69. For an analysis of Haussmann’s life and legacy, see Carmona. For an account of the political and social impact of his work on Paris, see Tombs (20–30). 6. For a comprehensive account of the history of urban planning in Europe and North America, focusing particularly on Britain, see Hall. 7. ‘With the four giants at the four corners / and four gates mid-wall Hooo Fasa / and a terrace the colour of stars / pale as the dawn cloud’ (Pound 425). 8. Parsons argues that the figure of the rag-picker is an example of such a new perspective, one simultaneously familiar with the city and marginalized from its social and cultural life. 9. Enda Duffy discusses the work of the anthropologist Marc Augé, who argued that the exercise of power involved the aggressive rationalization of ‘places’ with all of their historical associations and particularities into ‘non-place’, that is, spaces without cultural specificity or identity. In this process ‘placed- ness’ is ‘relegated to the status of vestige’ (Duffy 44). 213 214 Notes 10. For a comprehensive analysis of the work of the Wide Streets Commission, see Sheridan (108–35). For an analysis of the ways in which local and national politics influenced the work of the Commission, see McParland (101). 11. In the Stephen’s Green development, all owners were required to plant six sycamore trees, and there were also some general criteria laid down as to the allowable height and style of the buildings. See Sheridan (81–6). 12. Minutes of the Wide Streets Commission, held at Dublin City Archives, 1802 (16). 13. For a study of the conditions and history of Dublin’s extensive slums during this period, see Prunty. 14. See Brady (14–15). 15. For two such accounts of planning in Dublin, see Bannon and McManus. 16. For example the main thrust of the plan, we are told, is slum clearance (vii). Although this is intended as a philanthropic gesture, it forms part of a policy of suburbanization and urban beautification that is more in keeping with the tendency of planning generally to seek to eradicate visible signs of poverty, or to seek physical determinist solutions to it rather than engaging with its deeper causes. 17. For an analysis of this type of dual temporality, and the aesthetic effects on writers from countries that have experienced it, see Parry, especially Chapter 10, ‘Tono-Bungay: the Failed Electrification of the Empire of Light’ (148–61). 18. Walkowitz and Mao also note that the ‘transnational turn’ in modernist studies is related to a shift in emphasis within literary criticism towards a more direct interrogation of how literature engages with the state apparatus as it manifests itself in daily life: ‘literary scholars seem more and more to be augmenting broadly Foucauldian approaches to the subject’s fashioning by putatively apolitical institutions, experts, and norms with attention to the dissemination of overtly political rhetoric, to perplexities of sovereignty as such, and to writers’ confrontations with immediate apparitions of the state.’ (745) 19. Jessica Berman’s reading of the modernist Bildungsroman (which draws upon that of Jed Esty) is informative in this regard. Noting that the developmental narrative of such texts is often frustrated by an anti-teleological turn in their plots, she argues that what often disrupts the protagonist’s development is a colonial plot or setting. They ‘are anti-developmental fictions set in under- developed zones’ that speak to us about the ‘connection between modernist aesthetics and modern colonialism’ (475). This is an example of the way that a given form can be transposed into a new context in order to highlight certain aspects of that society (the lack of possibility for growth and development due to colonial strictures), which also serve to inflect and alter the form that is transposed enough to warrant interrogating a form’s relations with a given locale. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses argue, similarly, that Joyce’s use of stream-of-consciousness and the ‘mythic method’ serves ‘not so much to establish the novel’s universalism as to insist on its decolonizing particularism’ (11). 20. We might helpfully view such networks of exchange in terms of what Melba Cuddy-Keane has called ‘cultural globalization’: ‘Cultural globalization is found in “patterns of reciprocal interaction”’, ranging through ‘homogeni- zation, contestation, hybridization and indifference’ (544). The definitive Notes 215 quality of cultural globalization thus lies in interactivity and interdepend- ency. In this definition global cultural exchange is not a process of intermix- ture through which participants move from the provincial to the universal, but rather a complex set of interactions between localities, or involving dif- ferent reactions between cultures, a form of negotiation, involving hybridization in some places, resistance in others. ‘Globalization thus does not exclude identity as conceived in terms of geopolitical boundaries; but it situates those constructs within a multidirectional, global space. The geopolitical and the global will always coexist.’ Ultimately, Cuddy-Keane’s reading of cultural globalization is a humanistic-liberal one in which it is a benign process of cross-fertilization of ideas juxtaposed with a seemingly destructive economic globalization. This reading does not address how cultural globalization reflects economic globalization, is often complicit in it, and is indeed scarcely separa- ble from it. 21. Among the examples of such art Williams mentions News From Nowhere (1890) by William Morris, in which the protagonist awakes in twenty-first- century London, which has been radically decentralized with the suburbs melting back into the countryside and only the more beautiful areas (like Trafalgar Square) surviving. Williams also mentions H. G. Wells, James Thomson’s Doom of a City (1857) and City of Dreadful Night (1874), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). 22. As Seamus Deane notes, almost all writers of this period responded to that paradigm. The ‘urge to make what was strange’, namely a recalcitrant Ireland, ‘familiar’ produced a subversion of that discourse that opened a new space in which to represent Ireland differently: ‘predicated on the shared belief that the country had never been adequately (or at all) represented before. The sense of an initiatory blankness, or emptiness, and the evolu- tion of the techniques by which it could be filled is an abiding one in Irish writing’ (120). The production of this cultural space (and, presumably, the initiatory blankness), Deane links to the experimentalism of Irish writing, arguing that it is experimental because it is in search of modes of cultural production that will find a way of representing Ireland beyond its linkage with Britain: ‘For the Dublin, the Ireland, he [Joyce] wrote of was, in an important sense, a nowhere, a territory not yet represented, a place caught between geography and history. The sacralizing agency in Joyce, as in these others, is displaced from the territory, or the nation, to the action of representing it. Representation becomes the auratic process by which a place that had been misrepresented or not represented at all finally achieves presence’ (133). 23. See Grene (135–47). 2 A Drama in Muslin and the Formation of an Irish Urban Modernism 1. For a discussion of Moore’s time in Paris and its influence on his artistic development, see Crisler. 2. Moore tells us that soon after arriving in Paris he begins to write ‘natural- ist’ poetry (‘Poems of Flesh and Blood’) which he regards as largely a collection of clichés about modern life: ‘ “Elle mit son plus beau chapeau, son 216 Notes chapeau bleu”… and then? Why, then picking up her skirt, she threads her way through the crowded streets, reads the advertisements on the walls, hails the omnibus, inquires at the concierge’s loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, “Que c’est haut le cinquième”, and then? Why, the door opens, and she cries, “Je t’aime.”’ (Confessions 62).

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