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"What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners" (U9.147-149). According to Stephen Dedalus' definition of the ghost in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter of Ulysses, anyone living "out-of-time"(even due to something as seemingly inconsequential as a "change in manners") can be incorporated into ghostliness. Central to this understanding of the ghost is the provision that the ghost need not have died before returning in spectral form. Indeed, throughout Ulysses the lines between living and dead are blurred, and the paralysis which Joyce identifies at the core of Ireland has the peculiar effect of transforming the characters into ghosts, trapped between life and death. The state of living death caused by the paralysis at the heart of Irish life means that Ireland is a place where the living and the dead indistinguishably haunt the streets and interiors, the fields and tombs. Ireland is a country populated by ghosts.
Joyce's use of the Gothic as a mode of expression, available to comment upon a situation engendered out of deep and repeated trauma, develops, I believe, out of his reading of earlier writers who adapted Gothic techniques to their own ends. Any reading of Joyce's Gothic must therefore look to Joyce's predecessors as the starting point, the omphalos of the Joycean Gothic. In particular, the nineteenth century poet James Clarence Mangan wrote of the effects of the Great Famine in terms of the living dead. Joyce had more than a casual interest in Mangan's writing, for he wrote several lectures upon Mangan, focusing on the notion of the poet as a symbol of the nation. In these lectures, Joyce simultaneously praises and condemns the poet, revealing a nuanced understanding of Mangan's verse which he puts to greater use in portraying paralyzed Irish life. With this in mind, I suggest that in Ulysses, Joyce takes from Mangan an emphasis upon guilt and the use of the ghost to represent traumatic events, but surpasses Mangan in his analysis of the political dimensions of these literary devices. While critics have observed the centrality of ghosts and of guilt to Joyce's creation, critical response largely overlooks the historical or social factors which intervene, focusing instead (as many...
