Le programme et le revenant : Joyce, Blake et « the daughters of memory »

Résumé 0

Joyce is situated historically at the meeting point of two conceptions of memory: the ancient technique of the ars memoriae based on mnemotechnics, and the modern electronic technology of storage and retrieval of data through computers. Paradoxically, Joycean memory is directed both towards the past and towards the future. On the one hand, it is haunted by opaque uninterpretable blocks of memorized past, on the other hand, it tries to devise programmes enabling it to frame in advance the very form of future experience. Thus «The Boarding House» (Dubliners) opposes Mrs Mooney’s programmatic memory, which ruthlessly reconstructs the past event of the love affair between her daughter and Mr Doran, and Bob Doran’s groping existential memory, which vainly tries to interpret the past event. The end of the story shows Polly Mooney passing from the second model to the first. In the «Nestor» episode of Ulysses Stephen Dedalus is caught between two conceptions of time and of the past: a discontinuous time oscillating between timeless moments of stasis and apocalyptic conflagrations; and an ordered sequential time of progress. In his Aristotelian meditation on the potential and the actual he sees the linear historical sequence recurrently subverted by parallel unaccomplished potential versions, so that his memory is haunted by static, almost hallucinatory moments of cinematographic intensity. This proliferation of potential versions announces the serial construction of the «Ithaca» episode in Ulysses and its Beckettian aftermath in Watt.